< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FIVE DAYS INTO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION Alexandra van de Kamp and I’m fluent in the words Executive Order, its acronym, EO, and, as a '60's kid, know it has little to do with Electric Light Orchestra , unless, by electric, we mean relentlessly on edge, veins aglitter with news-minnows. Five days into this new game show, and there’s already an eloquent, cascading disorder; an eddying, occupying flora overgrowing grasses and skies, fogging up our panes. Five days in, I’m looking at the squirrels, their bodies calligraphing the trees, for some philosophical tidbits, some wisdom outpacing my brain. I’m asking the clouds how they buoy despite their soggy weight. I’m renegotiating what feels safe. And today, safe feels like a shriveled postage stamp, running with ink. It feels like the overflowing clawfoot tub in a BBC mystery when the mother slits her wrists in the bath, expecting to be found—her blood a dark lily swaying in the water as her daughter arrives, witnesses what she’s done. Five days in, and I’m wondering: Am I this woman, misjudging the time I have left? I'm wanting a vaster, faster-reacting vocabulary for doubt and dread . What about lead-bout , hammered-heart , dead-gut ? And despite all this, here you are on a Saturday morning, wearing the bright blue pullover you said you'd never wear and drinking a second cup of coffee, anchored to our small history, our kitchen—my other voice, my trembling wind socket, my skin chime. "Five Days into the New Administration" was a breakthrough because I learned political anger could be channeled through a poem with playful aspects, like referencing Electric Light Orchestra while thinking of the onslaught of Executive Orders signed by the Trump Administration. I also saw that a political poem could have a certain elasticity and could include a scene from a BBC TV series to comment on the unfolding and highly disturbing political atmosphere. Lastly, writing this poem helped me find my voice in a challenging time. Previous ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink , San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. She is the author of the poetry collections Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, 2022), Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press, 2016), and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (WordTech, 2010). alexandravandekamppoet.com Next

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

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:53 POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp Later agrees to be the change of subject. On Thursday a fever adored him and then it didn’t, and now it does again. His soft bit of electric hair. His erasing. Two days more and fluid is swimming his lungs. How still we are. Invisible in the soon or very soon. The day nurse gets up, props him up, and up and up in bed, and hums and nests a white towel across him. Obedient oxygen accedes through a tube as a current and I want him to sing to me. A riff from Sinatra, a prayer. His breathing lands in even froth, the whoosh and pecking. I understand it. Or how long I have been making a life in his shadow. First day of spring and brooches of green. I speak close and loose, all calm exits versed beyond our past knots which still halve my mind. I make up the difference of his loyal not talking. I daughter. I squirm. I shape words into harmonics and within each scale a proverb. I watch his hands gesture. His mouth doesn’t know questions. Here I am watching some edge of being apart to being farther apart. A hot pink sun comes in urgent to land. It’s interesting to me to look through my drafts of this poem that deal with the end of a life, the actual final days or moments. I changed the title four times, looking to recalibrate my thinking. The poem went through a number of other revisions, too, though “past tense” was there from the start. At one point, I got more interested in exploring that term, and discovered there are four past tenses. This gave me a new way to consider a subject so close to my heart. 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 BALLAD OF U AND ME klipschutz 00:00 / 00:52 BALLAD OF U AND ME klipschutz You did not want me for an ardent suitor Yet you did not want me to forget you to forget you and your green eyes You did not choose me over any other But your brow forbade me to abandon you to abandon you and your red mouth You did not see me underneath your window When you summoned me to look up at you to look up at you and your black skirt I did not chase you through the mails or meadows For to make you mine without knowing how— green eyes red mouth black skirt Romance: the headiness of infatuation: the pursuit; catching up and being caught up with. Falling into each other’s arms: a mutual breaking down of resistance. 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue BLUEBIRD ABECEDARIAN Pamela Uschuk for Laura-Gray Street Aegean blue etches frost air a deeper indigo than river-scrubbed lapis or blue hair dye or cadmium fresh from the tube onto canvas’s deep glacial lake. Blue catches me wandering dawn song ether, where no bombs blow off freezing feathers from wings, where no random gunshots thwack red birds with the snap of their terrible teeth. Hobbling, mothers drag kids through Gaza, from unsafe to unsafe in genocide’s firestorms of missile revenge. Just when I think this Virginia sky has birthed a kite of quietude with its upswung limbs of live oak, redbud, elm and maple’s sugar hope news intrudes its list of atrocities opening old wounds that never get a chance to heal. Peace? Ceasefire? These ancient questions are tacked to my sleeve like small roses of blood leaking from a child’s forehead pixilated on screen, laptop or smart TV in your own living room where you used to lounge with your lover or your cat, both valentines of hope, that elusive word again like a ghost whale or x-ray of a leg bone shattered by a grenade or a splatter of yellow feathers. Ground Zero is war’s footprint, unseen by bluebirds the size of a human heart. I wrote this Abecedarian as a model poem for an advanced undergraduate poetry class when I was the Pearl S. Buck Visiting Writer at Randolf College in Virginia. Besides Natalie Diaz’s wonderful “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation,” I couldn’t find an example that was quite right for this class. This poem tries to hold all the grief and outrage I feel by the ongoing assault on Gaza, a country that has been almost bombed out of existence by Israel, whose firepower is overwhelming. I incorporated a lot of bird imagery because birding is one of my greatest joys. The poem is dedicated to Laura-Gray Street who brought me to Randolf, and who I had the great privilege of going birding with. The poem turned out to be an anti-war poem. The last line was one of those gifts that come out of the blue, a lucky line. This is another breakthrough poem for me. Previous PAMELA USCHUK is the author of eight books of poems and has received many awards including the American Book Award. She is a senior fellow and board member of Black Earth Institute, as well as Editor in Chief of Cutthroat , a Journal of the Arts. www.pamelauschuk.com Next

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

Nancy Takacs < Back to Breakthroughs Issue A WHISPERING BEETLE Nancy Takacs 00:00 / 01:07 A WHISPERING BEETLE Nancy Takacs I am like this beetle, tentative and a little blue, or is that the reflection of sky on her back or is it the reflection of my cup as she wanders toward my warm hand? I sit in the frayed lawn chair before today’s winds that are supposed to rip up trees and roofs. She paces from my hand to my shoulder so easily whispering in my ear: take better care of yourself , and I feel the first breeze before the storm comes, I feel her antennae caressing my cheek, this, the second day of spring though already I’m worrying the apple tree will freeze, and she says: hush, the blossoms will come, but please carry me back on your soft palm and place me under the juniper tree where my sisters and I live, gently, gently . Published in About Place Journal , 2025. The speaker identifies with something as small as a beetle. They are both vulnerable, the speaker maybe more so than the calm, wise beetle. Fearful of what comes with climate change, and the devastation caused by sudden large storms, the speaker hears the female beetle’s words that lead her into an awakening to care better for herself first, and then to care for the beetle as well. These are gentle instructions to the self, a plea to lessen anxiety. It is the interaction that sets the speaker on a good path. We all have awakenings, interacting with creatures we are a part of. Through caring, in this case, we give each other hope, especially during these egregious times that affect both humans and animals. Previous NANCY TAKACS 'S newest book, A Whispering Beetle (Broadstone Books), will be published in 2027. Her latest book is Dearest Water (Mayapple Press, 2022) . She lives in Wellington, Utah. nancytakacs.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue LETTERS FROM HOME: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Knowing I was lost-puppy homesick, my mother wrote every day, breezy letters to let me know that she, Dad, and my kid brother missed me (about which I was dubious) and were hoping I was enjoying myself, (I wasn’t) and eating healthy, delicious camp food, which, if she were fed that slop she’d have rescued me immediately from that Sing-Sing. I read her letters once, reassurance there was still a world beyond the metaphorical barbed wire of the camp, and didn’t look at them again. The one I did treasure was from my dad, his chicken-scratch not my mom’s pen-beautiful cursive: a man who wrote only when figuring out his piecework-pay for the week. He told me how the Dodgers— recently absconding for L.A. like sneak thieves—were doing; both of us wishing them rat-chattering torment in the NL cellar, forever, and confided he’d made a big score on a bet, and had a surprise for me when I was freed from that pit of deepest hell: my reward for sticking it out and not whining, too much. "Letters from Home" is part of a forthcoming collection entitled A Tale of Two Summers . Some kids love going to summer camp. I wasn’t one of them. So I cherished the letters I got from my mother, and even more, the one I got from my father since he never wrote anything except to figure out his weekly pay and to work the daily crossword puzzles. And of course I cried my little wussy eyes out with each letter. Previous ROBERT COOPERMAN, "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife, Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/cooperman_robert 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

< 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue JUST SO YOU KNOW Carol Coven Grannick Eight years ago I parked here, right here, this spot by the elevator on ‘Bing Crosby’ as if it grounded me for the day to come. This is the song, Georgia , that played then each morning at 5:30 when I got out of the car already sickened, nauseated from the moment I saw familiar sights on the drive there in anticipation of what they might have done to you overnight— and always did. This is the elevator that led to the bridge, the bridge that led to the desk where I validated the parking ticket. This is the ticket that cost too much. This is the floor, the second floor, with gift shop and restaurants, Vietnamese, Vegan, Greek, Au Bon Pain where I bought Cape Cod kettle chips each night to stay awake while driving home, crunching them, banging teeth against one another while slow-steering through Western Avenue snow tracks of others. This too is the floor where I walked up, down and around, ascending and descending the pair of escalators each time around so legs would carry and heart would pound for myself and you, in bed in delirium on a floor I don’t remember unless it was 8—yes, it was 8— with a tube in your throat to breathe with doctors like vultures saying long-term care long-term care as if hungry for some foul and spoiled food. I walked up and down escalators in moments I hoped they wouldn’t notice, but they did, and when I left the room to walk or pee they came in to do to you what they couldn’t when I was there. More propofol. More fentanyl. Keep him quiet. Keep him quiet . And this: this is the coffee I bought. This is the table where I sat for a few minutes on the many days that passed— This is not how I sat though, not how alone I was: this is me being with you now, alive you, a little impatient with my memories because you don’t have them you don’t know what it was like or know why even years later I watch for the lanky surgeon in his fancy suit and dream of hitting him, hurting him, hurting, hurting, hurting him until he cries out, What did I do to her ? "Just So You Know" was published in Matter Anthology (Oprelle Publishing, 2023) . It was drafted in the rush of my visceral response as I sat waiting for my husband at the site of his previous devastating hospitalization, during which he barely survived neglect and mismanagement after the post-surgical trauma. The draft, and each subsequent reading or revision, clarified a personal breakthrough: the beneficial, though painful, awareness of post-traumatic stress that medical neglect and mismanagement had caused, and which persisted eight (and now twelve) years beyond. My husband was going to be left to die. It was up to me—with the constant and priceless support of my sister—to get him out alive. The breakthrough of awareness of this long-lasting PTSD energized my determination to continue telling the story, and educating others about the importance of patient advocacy when a loved one is hospitalized. Previous CAROL COVEN GRANNICK is an award-winning poet and children's author of Reeni's Turn (Fitzroy Books, 2020). carolcovengrannick.com 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