< 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY Stephen Ruffus It begins in a car speeding across the plains in the summer heat until the sun rests along the horizon. He waits to be born on an early morning, the nickel of the moon tacked low in the sky. On an empty street I see his shadow barely lit walking slowly toward me from a long distance. He is in the hallway in the place where I once lived. On one end he is the man he was. On the other is the child who favored dreams to bedtime stories I would read him, whose dreams now form the book written in words ever trespassing across the shifting landscape of my sleep. It is the second anniversary of my son's death, and I am dreaming of him as both a child and an adult simultaneously. The images in the poem, particularly the one in which I see him in the hallway of the apartment where I grew up, are meant to reflect my ongoing struggle with his loss and my understanding of who he was. 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue ISINGLASS Austin Holmes made coffee then watched rain in blurred sheets cascade down the mountain fed the dog thin light easing through the window moments to be forsaken thoughts of what is to come increasingly shapeless every moment as frail and unpredictable as a panicked bird something looms above all of us at once illuminating and obscuring the path we find ourselves on like moonlight subdued by clouds each night I dream of loss and wake to recollect it as though staring through isinglass resinous and fragmented The poem is about the thin barrier between waking consciousness and dream, and how, when our minds are full of worry for what is transpiring in the world, for our safety and the safety of our loved ones, and for what the future could hold, our dreams often become infiltrated by that worry. Much like the weak early light that struggles through the window in the opening lines, the lingering dread of these dreams permeates our day. We struggle to recollect details but are met with shrouds. Light, like memory, is obscured, and I imagined it filtering through isinglass, something organic and translucent but also obstructing. Like a house of mirrors, it splinters light in the way dreams splinter our memory and worry, distorting it. Previous AUSTIN HOLMES lives in southern Utah, where he spends life with his beloved partner and their dog. He contemplates what he can and falls in love with the sky daily anew. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE CITY HAS CHANGED Mona Mehas the city where I grew up has changed for the better I don’t remember coffee shops where poets read their work or parks with gazebos where drummers taught children I recall empty storefronts and homeless people on park benches the nicer parts of town were hidden or possibly off limits growing up poor produced a mindset difficult to leave behind the place has had an upgrade but I’ve moved away I visit friends from childhood my hometown seems foreign turn back time to the days of my youth I want the new town an area rich in culture and art music flowing from shop doors I want to grow up there in that improved city perhaps then I would change for the better "The City Has Changed" is a poem about the breakthrough experiences that made me see my hometown in a different light. For a while, I refused to believe it but after more time, I finally opened my eyes. Previous MONA MEHAS is a retired disabled teacher in Indiana, USA, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize (Paddler Press , 2023, and TV-63 , 2025), and for Best New Poet (Lucky Jefferson , 2024), with eight published chapbooks. Mona's work has appeared in multiple publications and online museums. She works with Cicada Song Press and Engage! , an online Star Trek fan magazine. Mona is a former President of the Poetry Society of Indiana and is Indiana Co-Leader of Authors Against Book Bans . She is editing her second novel while perpetually distracted by her next chapbook. monamehas.net Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue LET'S SAY Maureen Clark there is not a happy ending here the man stuck upside down in the cave will die what then? you will keep living more empty days you’ve begged before and no one came to save you there was no stretcher hauled out with a body breathing but broken mud and dirt worth the life how do you walk away without the rescue live the rest of your life with the always lost In trying to find new ways to deal with difficult subjects, I wrote in the Italian Rispetto form: eight lines, eleven syllables in each line. I like the way a very complex idea fits into this container, like a bento box. "let's say" was published in Sonic Boom . Previous MAUREEN CLARK is the author of the poetry collection This Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024 ) and has received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her memoir, Falling into Bountiful: Confessions of a Since Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl , is forthcoming from Hypatia Press. maureenclark.art Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE OLD MAN AND THE FENCES Alex Barr To a man of eighty, a thousand-foot hill is Everest. I see it from my kitchen window, three miles away, featureless green sloping to an inscrutable summit, often attended like Bali Ha’i by low-flying cloud. Its name is Cilciffeth—no-one here in Wales knows what that means. I knew I had to face the trial of strength it offered. From a challenge ever before your eyes, there’s no escape. In my youth I ascended the highest peaks of England, Scotland, and Wales. It was hard to let go that version of myself. I thought I could take in a long road walk before the start of the bridleway up Cilciffeth. How often I’ve rushed into things without investigating the pitfalls. The road swung left invitingly and I ignored the smaller road straight on. I was soon lost. The map made no sense. At an isolated property, a not-too-friendly woman gave me confusing directions. A half mile on, exhausted, I aborted my mission. For my second attempt I parked much nearer. No wrong turning this time. I reached the B4313 road, and found the bridleway. I thought a bridleway was a path you can ride a horse on, but I wouldn’t have ridden on that one, more stream than path, dangerously uneven, hemmed in by overgrown hedges. I was attacked by horse botflies which left furuncular lesions and a swollen finger. I sat on a grassy mound and drank water. Further on, the path widened and a view of distant hills, patches of woodland, and scattered farmsteads opened up. I made my second stop, this time with coffee. My home-made lemon polenta cupcake was tempting, but I saved it. The day had warmed and I was glad I brought shorts to change into. Cilciffeth was now ahead on the right. The map showed its eastern flank outlined in brown, denoting ‘Access Land’ where you could walk at will. But access was denied by a steep bank topped by a barbed-wire fence. I thought of turning back, less through fatigue than a hopeless feeling, but the rhythm of my feet led me on until I saw an opening, amateurishly blocked with rusty pieces of gate. I climbed over. I was on Access Land. Without an obvious path to the summit, I had to trek through low gorse and grassy tussocks which threatened to turn my ankle. The thought of having to be recovered by air ambulance or mountain rescue unnerved me, and there was no cell phone signal. Go on, or turn back? The map showed the summit just half a mile away, but I had lost the ability to judge the effort needed to cross that irritating terrain. I went on, but halted every twenty yards or so to reconsider. Would ageing legs hold out? Imagining the shame of a second failure drove me on. Cilciffeth is one of those hills where the skyline keeps suggesting a summit, then offers more rising ground as you approach. The only landmark ahead was a group of scrubby trees. I headed for them. They seemed to get no nearer. I thought of my friend M, with whom I enjoyed many walks, and whose death left me diminished. What would he say? “Press on!” I pressed on. Then I saw the fence. I had noticed it on the map and feared it would block me, but was surprised to see a gate in it. Nevertheless I was very tired. I took off my backpack and flopped down. Could I retreat without dishonor? Had I earned more coffee and—at last—the cupcake? Magic! The sweet sticky substance revived me. I climbed the locked gate. An overgrown cart track led on. A slight rise to my right was the summit itself, but that was a distraction, because my main aim was to see the harbor town I lived in, and if possible, my house, reversing the view from the kitchen. I plodded on until I saw the long pale row of houses on the headland above the harbor, then the harbor itself. It was enough. I retraced my steps, not suspecting what lay ahead. The problem with a mountain is that if you lose the end of the path you reached the summit by, you may descend by a different path which takes you miles from your starting point. Walking down through what seemed the same gorse bushes and patches of burnt heather, I saw a gate. It wasn’t the opening where I had climbed over, but surely led onto the right bridleway further along? It seemed not. Not far along the path petered out. Now I had to climb locked gates, field after field, reached through waterlogged mud churned up by cattle. Between waves of panic, I felt surprising moments of calm. The result of years of meditation? Or the feeling that in old age nothing matters? My strength still hadn’t given out. But where was the B4313? The landscape of small hills and patches of woodland was no different from that near my starting point, except in the details. After several more gates I saw a respectable-looking road in the distance. It curved round a hill, gently rising—and completely unfamiliar. There were no more gates. Now I had to climb hedgebanks topped with barbed wire fences. Then—a sign my hiking days were over?—the sole of my right boot came off. And yet I still felt calm. These obstacles were taking all my concentration. At last I reached a road. I’ve often arrived at well-known places from an unfamiliar angle, making them strange. To my surprise, a sign read B4314! It was the same road that went on to curve around a hill. I noted surrounding landmarks and checked the map. I had reached the B4314 a mile-and-a-half from where the bridleway joined it. A Hopalong Cassidy route march lay ahead. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. At the limit of my strength, I reached the car. I had conquered Cilciffeth. "The Old Man and the Fences" was published in 2024 in New Isles Press Issue 3, “Border Teorainn Mairch” in Northern Ireland. The story tells of a physical challenge and ordeal overcome by a man of eighty, spurred on by a memory of what his oldest friend would say. Previous ALEX BARR 's publications include two short fiction collections and three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Light and Dark (Kelsay Books, 2024) . He is assembling a collection of nonfiction. alexbarr.co.uk 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 13th of 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

New Orleans Villanelle by Ken Waldman Decadence and humidity, New Orleans midnights might as well be 9 A.M., the hour to rise up and get to it, see friends, practice soul-making, and like occupations. Jazz and funk. Sundry drug-taking. Orgasm. Decadence and humidity, New Orleans, magnetic crescent of extremes. The big fish wins. Schools lose. It's all a game, our race to rise up and get to it, see friends, better inhabit this peculiar, insular maze of action, our magnificent and gigantic terrarium. Shadiness and stupidity? New Orleans teaches us ecstasy and frustration. We expect change without change. It's always the same, always the hour to rise up and get to it, see friends, vow to begin anew. And yet we daily spin out of control. One more pothole? No problem! Shadiness, stupidity, decadence, humidity. That's New Orleans by the hour. So let's rise up and get to it, my friends. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I write lots of occasional poems and lots of formal poems. But this unpublished villanelle, written for my 2015 New Orleans fringe festival run, remains a favorite since I felt it captured something essential of my New Orleans experience. I'm always a bit nervous when sharing place poems with people who live full-time where I'm writing about. But New Orleans readers and listeners took to this one. Me, I'm partial how I could interchange “decadence and humidity” with “shadiness and stupidity” and how I found room for pothole, orgasm, and an always slippery time of day. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KEN WALDMAN has drawn on 39 years as an Alaska resident to produce poems, stories, and fiddle tunes that combine into a performance uniquely his. kenwaldman.com and trumpsonnets.com Next - I'd Rather Be Influenced by Patrick Ramsay Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue REACHING Terry Jude Miller In artificial light, a claw-like motif is found on the Island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Its fingers turn back the clock of man’s first art to 68,000 years ago, 232,000 solar rotations as Homo sapiens before the painter filled his mouth with ochre, spread his fingers upon stone, and spat history upon his hand, halo of red, giving meaning to something beyond the reach of explanation, an inflection only the heart can find, struggles to perfect itself through language, religion, science, and stories recorded in a new medium, by torched vision, innate to man, but as puzzling as the stars above Indonesia, that never see this creature’s masterpiece, yet the artist emerges from the place beneath ground, awed and mesmerized by their dance of light. This poem was inspired by a BBC article on the world's oldest cave art. The poem investigates how art is the springboard to language, religion, and science. Every poem I write owes itself in some way to these first artists who possessed a thought and made art from it. Previous TERRY JUDE MILLER works in academia in Houston, Texas. His poems have received multiple Pushcart nominations and have been published in Sontag Mag , Feed the Holy , Encore , Equinox , Trigger Warning Magazine , Exomorphosis , Ars Sententia , The Nature of Things , The Bayou Review , Boundless , the Poetry At Round Top Anthology , and Rattle . His latest book is People of Ink and Bone (New Dawn Unlimited, 2026) . Miller is the former 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. terryjudemiller.com Next

The Queen of Hell by Karin Anderson In 1773, George III’s architect, James Wyatt, was commissioned by Elizabeth, Countess of Home, to build a sophisticated ‘Pavilion’ designed purely for enjoyment and entertainment at No. 20 Portland Square. The Countess, aptly known as ‘The Queen of Hell’, was in her late 60’s, twice widowed, childless and rich. (Home House, “London’s Iconic Members Club” website) In her sixties and seventies, Elizabeth Gibbons, Countess of Home, was one of the most powerful and colorful characters of British high society. But finding authentic traces of her now— beyond the standing edifice on Portland Square—is tricky. I had to rummage. Contemporary references mostly bounce off internet repetitions, clones of each other. Original sources are sparse—in fact, I’m quoting most of them here. Historically, Countess Elizabeth is the “Queen of Hell” because William Beckford, an inconceivably wealthy brat young enough to be her grandson, bestowed the title in one of his many florid letters to his artsy who-alls. Not that he’d miss one of her parties. At least when he wasn’t about to be arrested. Beckford’s catty nickname for the Countess of Home (royal by calculated marriage) stuck to her like a meme, wafting down to us with little context. I’m not saying it’s not apt, but Elizabeth’s hellish queendom was not No. 20 Portland Square. Her hell simmered across the Atlantic, in the brutal slaveholding culture of Jamaica, richly funding the London party house. She was the only daughter and heir of William Gibbons of Vere in the island of Jamaica. Her first husband was James Lawes, son of the Governor of the island. After his death she married William, 8th Earl of Home on 25th December 1742. He was a Lt. General in the army and Governor of Gibraltar but he deserted her the year after the marriage. She had no children and died at Home House in Portland Square, London. (Westminster Abbey Website; Burial Commemorations) Elizabeth was born in 1703, maybe 1704—an only child, which likely means “only surviving child.” Her mother died in 1711, probably taken by one of the freewheeling diseases that jacked the death rate—for Black and white people alike—twice as high as the birth rate. Only slightly less probable causes of death: pirates. Maroons. Slave revolt. So many ways to die young in the Caribbean, even among the unimaginably wealthy and privileged. Elizabeth’s father William was a cane planter. He owned hundreds of sugar-producing acres stocked with hundreds of enslaved workers. At sixteen, Elizabeth married James Lawes. James’s father Nicholas, Governor of Jamaica, was even richer; he had a way of marrying (and surviving) widows of other rich men. Governor Lawes owned more land, enslaved more people, and was apparently more interested in distinguishing himself in public affairs than Elizabeth’s father. Maybe the only plantation family richer than the Gibbonses and Laweses: the neighboring Beckfords. Soon after marrying, Elizabeth commissioned a prestigious London sculptor to craft a memorial for her mother. I have never been there, but by all reports the plaque is still set in Halfway Tree Church near Kingston, in a parish they called Vere: Near this place lies intern’d with her parents, &c., the body of Mrs. Deborah Gibbons, wife to Willm. Gibbons, Esq., and daughter of John Favell, Esq., of ye county of York, who departed this life the 20th of July, 1711, in the 29th year of her age. To summ up her character in brief she was one of the best of women and a most pious Christian. She left only one daughter, who married the Honble. James Lawes, eldest son of Sir N. S. Lawes, Kt., Governor of this island, who in honour to the memory of so good a parent erected this monument to her. Here we see Elizabeth, the “Queen of Hell,” enshrining her mother’s pious Christianity. A trope? The sweetest phrase: “… one of the best of women …” but what did this mean to the daughter who had lost her too soon to know her? When James died, thirteen years after their wedding, Elizabeth imported another memorial—same sculptor, a prestige move—to the same church. The bust of James is puckish and lifelike. The inscription is in Latin, which I don’t read, but I’ve seen this translation: Nearby are placed the remains of the Honourable James Lawes: he was the first-born son of Sir Nicholas Lawes, the Governor of this Island, by his wife Susannah Temple: He married Elizabeth, the only daughter and heiress of William Gibbons, Esq; then in early manhood, when barely thirty-six years of age, he obtained almost the highest position of distinction among his countrymen, being appointed Lieutenant Governor by Royal warrant; but before he entered on his duties, in the prime of life—alas—he died on 4th January 1733. In him we lose an upright and honoured citizen, a faithful and industrious friend, and most affectionate husband, a man who was just and kind to all, and distinguished by the lustre of genuine religion. His wife, who survived him, had this monument erected to perpetuate the memory of a beloved husband. Alas. James Lawes, in life, was a pain in the butt among all and sundry—the entitled oldest son of one of Jamaica’s prominent planters, the governor’s obnoxious kid (we know his kind). James scooted to London after his father died, cleaned up his act enough to return with the crown’s appointment. Back on the island, however, he was no “upright and honoured citizen.” And by all-accounts-not-Elizabeth’s he was neither just nor kind. Genuine religious lustre: zero. But the last sentence of the epitaph may be accurate: his widowed, childless wife Elizabeth appears to have truly loved him—an obscure signal that she also harbored a trickster heart. Not yet thirty, Elizabeth Gibbons Lawes was now among the very wealthiest human beings in the western hemisphere. Heiress of her father’s Jamaican estates and her husband’s formidable holdings, she was richer—and better-landed—than many English royals. James, her dead husband, carried small-time noble blood through his mother’s line, thanks to his common father who had married the “relict” Susannah Temple. Elizabeth’s ancestry is obscure on both sides—the Gibbonses and Favells likely rose from the merchant/esquire class, or military, peppered with buccaneers. A New World pattern: upstart creole heirs entrusting vast properties (and the people enslaved on them) to ruthless hired managers. Raised rugged, isolated, accustomed to violent power and obscenely rich, the second generations believed they warranted royal prestige as they returned to the motherland. Third, fourth, fifth generations—or second, third, and fourth families—often slid back into rough poverty, inheriting only resentments. Elizabeth makes no mark on extant records for nine years after her young husband’s death. Did she hang around Vere, learning the sugar business and the enterprise of enslavement? Did she party in Kingston and Spanish Town, attended by human beings she called her property? Did she, like her Jamaican neighbors the Beckfords, bring Black “servants” to England to pad the shock of return? She appears in London at age thirtyeight, on record for her second marriage: Christmas day 1742, to the eighth Earl of Home. I am no Anglophile. I had to look this up: an earl is the British equivalent of a count. The Earl of Home was several years younger than Elizabeth, dissolute, and probably homosexual (which was not nearly as rare as my ancestor-searching Mormon relatives wish to acknowledge. Not nearly). Elizabeth bailed her prodigal earl out of some hefty bankruptcies, he abandoned her a year after the marriage, her wealth was barely dented, and now she was a countess. Deal. Aaaand she goes invisible again for thirty years, then blazes up in 1773 to contract James Wyatt, a trendy London architect, to design and build her party house on Portland Square. Reminder: Elizabeth was sixty-seven. Notoriously drunk, dirty, and sporadic, Wyatt erected the outer structure and a few ornate ceilings before Elizabeth got fed up and fired him, hiring his rival Robert Adam to redesign and finish. Adam’s takeover-makeover produced one of the most legendary and enduring interiors of the Georgian era; beyond its wide but unostentatious front façade, the entry opens into multiple stories of elaborate and spacious gathering rooms, bound by a central staircase spiraling under a glass dome. Skylight reaches nearly every chamber. A covered garden extends beyond the rear exit. Although there were sleeping quarters, the house was—and remains—a social hall, made to be lit, designed for music, drink (rum I guess), fine food, and rich party animals. For much of the twentieth century, the Home House served as the Courtauld Institute, displaying an offbeat but prestigious art collection. On my first (and probably last) visit to London, as a young wife married to an artist committed to the high truths of the European Enlightenment, I spent a full day in the Countess’s “Pavilion,” although I had no sense of its history or peculiarity. Now the building houses a prestigious private club, frequented by descendants of the original royal revelers. The parties were, by all reports, ragers. Booze. Drugs. Orgies. Costumes. Birthday suits. People came off the streets, out of the palaces, highborn and lowlife. Once, Elizabeth invited a couple of passing Black men in to show the orchestra how to kick up the beat, but they drank themselves to sleep in the kitchen instead. Parties went on for days, one event indistinguishable from the next. The woman was in her seventies. During Elizabeth’s residence, two life-sized, full-body portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland hung on either side of a grand fireplace. A ceiling-high mirror enhanced the grandeur. Thomas Gainsborough was the artist; if you’re not an art history type, orient by recalling that he also painted The Blue Boy and Pinkie . The Cumberland portraits now belong to the Royal Collection Trust and hang in Buckingham Palace—amusing because the couple in their time were notorious for (figuratively at least) farting in the general direction of the king and queen. * * * Henry Frederick, the portrait’s Duke of Cumberland, was King George III’s younger brother, bigly royal but outside the line for the throne. Think Harry, if you must. Anne Luttrell Horton, the portrait’s Duchess of Cumberland, was a widowed Jamaican plantation heiress, in fact James Lawes’ half-sister’s daughter, making her Elizabeth’s half-niece by (long-ago Jamaican) marriage. Elizabeth’s wayback Jamaican sister-in-law had married into the Luttrell family. The Luttrells were surly Irish nobles (also Jamaican planters) committed to social advancement through shameless seduction and/or election rigging and/or vicious personal violence. Hence Anne Luttrell, Elizabeth’s Irish/Jamaican creole niece, widow of some dude named Horton, sprang up at the right moment to become the Duchess of Cumberland. She took to batting her famous eyelashes, flashing her coyest-in-all England green eyes at dumb-as-dirt playboy Henry, the king’s brother. The Luttrells campaigned (blackmailed) for marriage. Hard. Sure, the old serial groom, Governor Lawes, had labored to give his descendants noble blood, but his granddaughter was out of her league. By royal reckoning, Duke Henry was succumbing to a rank commoner, a confoundingly rich creole hick. The creoles won. King George III was furious, inspiring the newlywed Duke and Duchess to take a long honeymoon on the continent. But they returned to their fine estate after long enough, mere walking distance from Buckingham Palace. They played cool uncle and aunt to the Prince of Wales, who liked sneaking over to party like only the Jamaicans could. After yet another brother married a commoner, King George decreed that no member of the royal family could marry without the monarch’s permission, and certainly could not marry a nonroyal. * * * William Beckford (the father of the WB who called Elizabeth the Queen of Hell), possibly the very richest of the Jamaican rich, had also relocated to London, holding various offices—including, over time, Sheriff of London and even Mayor. Despite the high functions, Daddy Beckford was a colorful guy, leaning with the “radicals” who liked to worry the legitimate gentry. Little William Thomas Beckford, next generation, sole heir of his father’s mad fortune, was about thirteen when Elizabeth launched her Portland Square project. This William, a gorgeous, flamboyant Peter Pan (Google his portrait), eventually left England for the continent, hiding out after a scandalous and super kinky (and criminal, even for him) affair with a seriously underaged and even prettier boy. In comfortable exile, young Beckford wrote a dense proto-romantic novel rife with artsy erotic adventures called Vathek, which no one ought to endure, not because it’s perverse (adorned with sensually compliant dwarves and a sexy “black eunuch” who manages Vathek’s harem of “females,” etc.) but because it’s a ponderous “gothick” fundamentally hostile to the twenty-first-century attention span. It’s worth grazing though: his depictions of exotic pleasure palaces seem to be inspired by Elizabeth’s Portland joint. And, possibly, Jamaican fantasies. Beckford made his own attempts at an architectural legacy with the “help” of the same James Wyatt Elizabeth fired. All of this may have spiraled down like Elizabeth’s skylit staircase to birth Coleridge’s In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure dome decree … * * * Some sources report that the Cumberlands commissioned Gainsborough to paint the matching portraits, and then gave them as a remarkable (and self-aggrandizing) gift to Elizabeth, prompting her to build a stately pleasure dome to house them. Other sources say that Elizabeth commissioned the paintings to flatter the Cumberlands, strengthening her ambivalent and ornery link to established prestige. The portraits are stunning: Gainsborough’s high rococo style, feathery fabric strokes, matching mid-body ferric reds. The artist overcomes the duke’s buggy eyes and wigged pointy head by sussing Henry’s integral sex-money-titular swagger. He fingers royal gold hanging from his neck, reminding all that not even the king can deny the facts of true lineage. Gainsborough portrays Anne somewhere between distinguished lady and incorrigible coquette—drooping lashes over vivid eyes, an almost-smile offering and withholding. The Duchess, like all her family and apparently like the regulars who partied in the court of the Queen of Hell, cursed like a pirate: Lady Anne Fordyce is reported as saying that after hearing (the Countess) talk one ought to go home and wash one’s ears; Lady Louisa Stuart called her vulgar, noisy, indelicate, and intrepid but not, she adds, accused of gallantry. (Historian Lesley Lewis, 1967) * * * It’s appealing, cowgirl American that I believe I am, to root for these appalling white Jamaicans as the feisty underdogs, returned from the rough West to mimic and mock the arrogant royals. Guess I inherited a New World urge to poke self-important folks in the eye with a sharp stick. However. Back when it was legal to assign college students to read words that challenged their worldviews, I spent a week trying to guide my sophomore composition students through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations . A bright young woman— certainly the finest natural writer of the group—said, “Well, if I had any ancestors who owned slaves, I guess I’d feel kind of responsible. But I don’t, so don’t see how this is my problem.” I formulated some responses, but, really, she’d just excused the class. They were done, grateful that she’d stated the obvious. On the train home I admitted to myself that, for all my righteous attitudes about race and history, I too was happy that I had no slaveholding forbears. Not literally, anyway. * * * My down-home Idaho mother knows little of her own maternal ancestry because her mother died very young, at thirty-three. My mom is a sincere and unpretentious Latter-Day Saint, and, maybe due to this early loss, she’s always eager for her academic daughters to retrieve genealogical information about “who we are.” I bailed on my mother’s religion—any religion—long ago, but I like research and I do narrative, so I’m happy to help appease her passion for filling in names and dates on her family group sheets. I try to dig around, find context, pull up information to enrich the characters for her. So far, it’s felt reasonably safe. What even in my straight-from-Europe dirtpoor-immigrant ancestry could foist the brutalities of Jamaican and Barbadian slavery on us? So, tracking the (heavily obfuscated) generations of her Grandma Gibbons’s family was —I don’t know. Should it really be such a shock? Gibbonses proliferated on both islands; my theory now is that Elizabeth’s father had a second family on Barbados— possibly half-siblings she never discovered. But every guess is raw speculation: who even were they? Any of them? They’re no good for fiction; I can’t imagine them well enough to fabricate. Not like I have no evil in me, to help me “relate” to them. I have plenty. It’s just not a world I can conjure. My mom isn’t interested in following this family thread any further. This is not who we are. Maybe that tells me plenty. She’s eighty-eight. It’s not my call to badger her—and, anyway, whatever’s left of those people, they’re already in me as much as they’re in her. If her religion is as true as she hopes, she’ll have to chat those people up in the next life. I’ll leave it to them. * * * But here’s an eighteenth-century Barbadian plantation song, written down (with musical notations) by someone who thought it mattered enough to transcribe as he stood to listen to enslaved people “chanting” in the fields: Massa buy me he won’t killa me Massa buy me he won’t killa me Oh Massa buy me he won’t killa me O ‘for he killa me he ship me regulaw For I live with a bad man oh la for I live with a bad man Obudda bo For I live with a bad man oh la ‘for I would go to the Riverside Regulaw Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link “The Queen of Hell” is a recent foray into ancestral tracing, with problematic implications. Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Ignatius by Karin Anderson 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