Fireflies by Kevin Prufer He was fifteen and feeling hassled and he asked his mother to please fuck off, so she slapped him hard and told him to get out of the car because he could walk home. + As he walked, his anger smoldered. He imagined her car crushed against a tree, he imagined her pleading for help as he strode right past toward home exactly as she’d commanded— + and half an hour later, as he rounded the corner to their yellow house, he saw her blue Honda in the driveway, and knew she was already at her desk because + it was evening, because she had homework, because she had her accounting class early in the morning at the college and still he was angry, though his anger had lost its focus— + why had he said what he’d said? Why had she slapped her own son? Anyway, he wanted to hate her + but it was a beautiful summer evening, the chirring of crickets, the fireflies— he would remember the fireflies years later rising and falling in the gloom, + his old gray cat uncurling on the porch steps, walking up to him, purring and rubbing her cheek against his leg there beneath the streetlamp. + The cat was long dead, but his mother was still alive. Just today he’d brought her another mystery novel, then sat with her in her hot little apartment while she went on about what someone or other said to someone else, he didn’t try to keep track, + but as she spoke, his mind reached back to that evening long ago, how he’d stood in front of their old yellow house in the hot evening, his hatred dissipating among the now-extinct fireflies that rose and fell above the rhododendrons. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I’ve always been interested in the way a poem can move through time, making use of white space and shifts in narration to accomplish that movement. Also, how memory works in a poem—how, in this case, the boy’s conflict with his mother in his memory is every bit as real as the present day, when she has grown old and reads mystery novels in the hot little apartment they never lived in together. It’s this telescoping of time and memory that excited me as I wrote this, and the complex dissipation of childhood anger. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KEVIN PRUFER'S newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches , which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them , which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize Anthology , The Paris Review , and The New Republic , among others. He also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors. kevinprufer.com Next - Automotive by Kevin Prufer Next

Teddy Thompson Croons Leonard Cohen by Natalie Padilla Young tonight will be fine, will be fine, will be fine It’s not even a love song, it’s the last drop of milk on dry cereal: the I that knows small windows, bare walls, a finale of soft naked lady: a sighing stripped, a woman. (Remember that first side sway, first spinning hug with someone of possibility? A lot of sweaty skins ago.) Not just ooh-la-la slow stuff, also others with beats, a call to feet, to hips, to who must swing, must knock the head back in time—not century time, music time—4:4, two-step, whatever. (Try not to remember. You still feel a grapefruit clenched in your chest.) Maybe it’s a full room in coordinated sigh. I know from your eyes, and I know from your smile An exhale in, out of that mouth. Maybe things will work, maybe just fine. (A lot of things conjure craving, but he’s only a man, a man too thin singing sweetly.) At the end, there is plenty and not enough to be so brave and so free In this place without explanation, put Teddy on repeat. Teddy repeats Leonard and someone hums along for a while Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I must admit I have no clarity with this one—is it the poem or the song that I’m attached to? I wrote this when I heard Teddy Thompson cover Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine,” initially thinking the lyrics were “tonight we’ll be fine.” I sent this little guy out quite a few times and then benched it for years, until a few months ago when I decided to revive and revise. Maybe go listen to Teddy sing Leonard and see what you think. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NATALIE PADILLA YOUNG co-founded and manages Sugar House Review . Author of All of This Was Once Under Water (Quarter Press, 2023). natalieyoungarts.com Next - The Worrier by Nancy Takacs Next

Ignatius by Karin Anderson My God. Maybe I’ve had enough. Let me go home to my own descendants. Maybe my grandmother was right: why dwell on such tragic tales? You’re in too deep. Sudden withdrawal will harm you, distorting all that you dream. What, like meth? I do not understand your meaning. I do not understand my meaning, either. How do I return? Return is eternal. There is nothing but return. I’m not yet ready to believe that’s true. Derrida says the real future is the one we have never seen. I take that to mean our children may still have a few surprising options. Who the f--- is Derrida? Never mind. Send me one last guide. Someone to help me find my mother’s lost people. Please. I want to bring them to her while I can. So many early deaths—no one to preserve the stories. Her mother’s whole family vanished, so young, so many consecutive generations. So many well-meaning replacements insisting on their erasure. How can you tell a four year-old to quit crying for the sudden disappearance of all she understands? She sure did learn to stop the tears. Taught us to do the same. Do we even exist—did we ever exist—if the stories, even the imperfect ones, even the fragments, dissipate with the tellers? My leg hurts. Mine too. So I want a guide on this one. Rational, undramatic, sympathetic. Like my mother. Woman, all you have to guide you through this last mystery is the internet. You’ve run the well of revelation dry. I’m very old, and I’m tired. You purport to be a scholar, do you not? Find her people within the Babel of that lighted box. They do trace themselves in her; you will recognize them as they speak unto your mind. Give me a head start. How far back before we find something familiar? An origin—not just a genealogy? Not so far, in my reckoning. A long time in yours. Begin in Providence, say, 1800. They are, already, five generations made by this perplexing and violent New World. You will be among fellow Americans. Okay. Two brothers, Silas and Festus Sprague, seven years apart. Twin sisters, Barbara Ann and Millicent Lindenberger. The brothers are first cousins to the sisters. Now a multi-family removal to the Ohio frontier. A ricochet of marriages and a sensible family’s capitulation to a story of American angels. A trek to a landscape alien as a moon. My mother wants me to disentangle an administrative forgetting: “The record says that Barbara Ann is married to either Silas Sprague, or Festus Sprague. Which is it? We need to get it right.” Her urgency is different from mine: she wants to put those old lives in order. She wants to send correct information to Salt Lake City, so the Mormon Church can make the long-ago union eternally official. I wish to deconstruct. But we’re both leaning over the same diorama. So I’ll do the homework, and then I’ll walk her in. I will be my mother’s guide. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue As an ‘apostate,’ I work to redeem idiosyncratic meanings from my Latter-Day Saint and Lutheran heritage. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams (Torrey House Press, 2019) portrays peculiar impacts of ancestry; I “resurrect” genealogical figures by inventing a relationship with the medieval Catholic Saint Ignatius, who taught his followers to meditate on a scriptural story so intensely that they could enter it and converse with its characters. This passage appears late in the book’s sequence, as Ignatius loses patience with his cynical acolyte. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Knotted Wrack by Maureen Clark Next

Interstellar by David Romtvedt When I was a kid I wanted the aliens to land, open the door of their ship and appear, halo of light around their heads, seven-fingered hands in silver gloves waving me on board while speaking some unknown language like French. The years have passed and the ship hasn’t come. I lean out the door and sniff the air, cock my ear listening for the UPS truck in the distance, back ordered package on its way. When the truck stops, I lift my front paws onto the steel step and leap up. The driver leans down biscuit in hand. From the open doorway, I call out, Ne t’inquiètes pas— je t’enverrais une postale , surprising everyone with my knowledge of French. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem speaks to the interpenetration of experience and imagination. As a child in a rather unhappy home, I dreamt of flying away with the aliens. Indeed, my wife has said she hopes the aliens never land as she’s certain I’ll get on board. Then there’s my dog who will climb up into any UPS truck he sees. Finally, there’s the dog I’ve not yet met who not only speaks French, but appears to write it, promising to send me a postcard, me promising to send you one. Currently unpublished, “Interstellar” is the opening poem in Still on Earth to be published by the Louisiana State University Press. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DAVID ROMTVEDT'S latest book of poetry is No Way: An American Tao Te Ching (LSU Press, 2021). He was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He graduated from Reed College, with a BA in American Studies and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaïre (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, bookstore clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, blueberry picker, ranch hand, and college professor. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, The Pushcart Prize , and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, Romtvedt served as the poet laureate of the state of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011. davidromtvedt.com Next - Sunday Morning Early by David Romtvedt Next

Something To Surrender To by Austin Holmes fear vibrates between flesh ricocheting off bone nothing is truly inviolable upon recollection time reveals the seams and how to split them every year I seem to unlearn my understanding of life the residue of memory clinging to me like cosmic dust mingling to new forms without purpose yet at night I stare upward at the damselflies like dark strands of vitreous on the retina of the clouds darting away as the eyes chase them before the sun arrives from the unwinding dark the old notes of night’s world fade as though lightly fallen upon the skin of a dream and I give myself to it Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue The last few years have increasingly taught me that acceptance of human fragility and the ability to be vulnerable is an immense strength, and that often, when feeling crushed by the weight of things we cannot control, it is the intimacy of small moments that bring me back to Earth. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Bone Suite by Austin Holmes Next

ALIEN EXCHANGE PROGRAM - HOST APPLICATION by Naomi Ulsted It’s extremely important that we choose a good host match for our aliens. This is the inaugural year of our Alien Exchange Program where we hope to facilitate mutual learning and understanding of these new neighbors we’ve discovered. Please answer the following questions honestly. 1. Do you plan to turn over your exchange student to the Federal government or any other for-profit or not-for-profit organization planning to conduct experimental exploration on our exchange student? Yes (you may turn in your application now) x No (go on to the next question) 2. Even if they offer you extremely large sums of money? Yes (you may turn in your application now) x No (go on to the next question) 3. How did you hear about the Alien Exchange Program? It was at the mall. Which is odd because I hardly ever go to the mall. I find the mall suffocating, with the cloying Cinnabon scent, the crowds of women flocking Bath and Body Works, the teenage boys cruising the walkways with slouching bravado. Not to mention that since our species have taken to using semi-automatic weapons with bump stocks to gun down large numbers of each other in public spaces, I’ve been especially reluctant to visit the mall, a concert, a movie, or any other crowded area. If I had the money, I’d pay for the virtual reality mall, where I could turn off the Cinnabon smell and if someone gunned down my avatar, I could just respawn somewhere else. But like most people in my social circles, I can’t afford that luxury. I won’t tell my alien how we like to kill each other here. That day I was in desperate need of a new pair of sand boots, so I threw my Glock in my purse, hefted myself into my bullet proof vest and headed out to the mall. I found the Alien Exchange Kiosk right next to the kiosks where young, beautiful men call out to middle-aged women like myself, offering samples of lotion and salt scrub. They’ll apply it themselves if you let them, rubbing your skin with their smooth hands. They can always sense their customer. We’re the ones wearing jeans from a decade ago. Our faces show we haven’t grasped the concept of contouring. We’re the ones with credit cards with high limits. If I could afford the virtual reality mall, I’d use a male avatar carrying a broadsword. Those lotion guys wouldn’t mess with me then. As it is, I try to walk in the aisle far from them, pretending I don’t hear them targeting me. As I passed by the Alien Exchange Kiosk, it placed images of the aliens’ planet into my mind. The planet’s surface was iridescent green and lush, not parched and withered like this one. As I came closer, the Kiosk’s smooth marketing voice resonated in my head asking, Do you have a thirst for adventure? Do you want to connect with another world? I thought about the words. I wanted to connect. 4. Have you experienced inter-stellar travel? (We know that only the top 1% of the country can afford inter-stellar travel. Or a house in the suburbs. Or post-secondary education. So if you choose, you can speak to international travel in your response to this question, as opposed to inter-stellar travel.) I have not experienced inter-stellar travel. When I was in college, I took out extra student loans so I could drink my way through a series of European pubs, but since I’ve grown older and more mature, I’ve redistributed my debt to involve less travel. Not less alcohol, mind you, but expenses in the form of living quarters, an iPhone, elementary curriculum feeds for the kids. Every day is planned and routine. When I traveled, I didn’t have plans. I woke up and perused a map over coffee. I shouldered my backpack and delved into the unknown. Now, when my alien comes to stay with me, we’ll have coffee in the morning. I don’t know if my alien wants scrambled egg protein for breakfast. I don’t know if my alien will even eat or if she’ll have an enlarged forehead and horizontal ovals for eyes, like in the old science fiction movies. I hope my alien isn’t slimy, but if she is, I’ll put a towel down on the kitchen chair. Come to think of it, I don’t even if know if my alien is female. Even we are evolving past binary constructs, but still, part of me hopes she’s female, like I’m still identifying. But I do know that as we regard one another in my kitchen, it will be like looking at that map in the morning, shouldering my backpack and hiking into the world of possibility. 5. While your alien is staying with you, we’d like him/her/them to feel as though he/she/they are a part of the family. Unless your family is completely dysfunctional, which may cause the alien to deliver a negative report about humans to his/her/their superiors. In what family events do you plan to involve your alien? In my extended family, there are no more weddings. The siblings have been married at least once, sometimes twice. Actually, we’re excited about a pretty big divorce happening soon. I’m hoping my alien can attend our divorce party after the trial. She can help me roll canapés and pour champagne to celebrate a new beginning. She can give us an alien blessing of some kind. A special symbol from her culture of a new start. She can stand or hover or whatever she does, in the circle with us, exchanging hugs. Of course, if the trial doesn’t go well for us, then I’ll keep my alien away from that function. My sister will return home to seek solace in one of her many online worlds. She’ll don her dragon slayer skin or a pull up her sexy spy avatar and forget about what just happened. My other siblings will sit and scroll through their phones like normal. But I will come home to my alien to see her playing Connect 4 with my children. We’ll make root beer floats and play charades and I will laugh and laugh, and forget the world is burning around me. 6. We want our alien participants to enjoy their time with you and the wonderful attractions our world has to offer, although we don’t want them to enjoy our world so much that they decide to come down here and colonize us. Can you speak to the types of attractions you plan to show your alien? Over a decade ago, I spent many afternoons downtown. I rode the city bus to the bookstore where I worked alongside the bookstore collie dog, re-organizing the New Age section and looking for attractive book covers to face out. For my lunch, I brought my cheese and pickle sandwich out to the park square. The benches were shiny burnished metal. The water from a bronze fountain depicting two leaping salmon sparkled in the sunlight. A pigeon gave me the side eye and cooed questioningly at my sandwich. Across the street, the theater marquis advertised the current production. I only made minimum wage at the bookstore and couldn’t afford shows, but being downtown in front of the theater, in the midst of the park blocks surrounded by sharply dressed business professionals made me feel like I was a part of something important. I would like to show my alien that place. She could relax in the bookstore, the dog sniffing her curiously. I’d buy her a book on chakras. She could reach her hand, or her appendage or appendages, out to the water in the fountain and splash with the children who wouldn’t be afraid of her, because they’re children who don’t fear things yet. I’d like to take her there, but it’s different now. I unplugged my children from their entertainment feeds recently and dragged them down there to see an actual show with real human actors in that theater I can now afford because most people prefer to escape home through their virtual reality systems. Bookstores are long gone and only Outside Dwellers have real dogs, since most people can afford a virtual pet. After the show, a nostalgic production that featured an old-style public school before institutionalized public education put children’s lives at risk, my children dragged me toward the salmon fountain. The water hasn’t run in it since the shortage years ago. Pigeons scavenged through the cracked and grimy tiles of the fountain without giving us a second thought. There were several Outside Dwellers lounging around the park square. Most Outside Dwellers are harmless. Scruffy and stinky for lack of water or dry soap, bare feet black with city filth, muttering stories that make sense only to themselves. That day several of them shared a six pack of 4 Loco. But you never know when a group of Outside Dwellers may be shooting up, not just smoking weed. Or when the story one of them is living in his mind may paint you as a threat. My kids wanted to play with the pigeons and my boy jumped from bench to bench, until I dragged them both away from the city square and the Outside Dwellers. We went back home where I hooked them up to their entertainment feeds again, nice and safe. If I took my alien there, she probably wouldn’t be afraid, like I am. She’d likely even sit down next to one of those Outside Dwellers, joining him on the grungy bench and sharing a 4 Loco. Maybe with her next to me, I’d be brave enough to hang out with the Dwellers, sharing stories and watching the light change as the sun dipped down into the smoggy sky and then dropped behind the towering skyscrapers. Twilight would fall like it’s fallen every evening, regardless of who is sitting in the city square, be it an Outside Dweller, an alien, or me. 7. There are hundreds of applicants for the Alien Exchange Program. In what way are you an especially good fit for this program? As I sit here in my living quarters, inputting these answers, I guess I can think of lots of people who might be a better fit. The families with money to take the alien to the places in our world that are still beautiful. Places with waterfalls, lakes, and piped in rain. I ’ve heard they still exist in some areas and the top 1% get to immerse themselves in those lakes, feel the spray of the waterfall on their bare arms. But when I was 13, I watched E.T. in the movie theater. Later, I watched more gruesome depictions of extraterrestrials, like those in Aliens, but my heart stayed with that waddling big-eyed, neck-stretching E.T. At night, even though I was 13 and knew better, I held up my finger to the window and searched the sky. I imagined my finger lighting up like Elliot’s and I reached it up toward the stars in search of an alien. Decades later, I know she’s up there, her own finger shining brightly. Please send me my alien. I need to meet her. Your application will be reviewed, and you will hear from us in four to six weeks. Should your application be selected for further consideration, alien placement will be contingent upon a home visit to ensure you can provide adequate facilities. This includes a fully functioning hydration pod, as aliens cannot adjust to our arid climate. You will also need to demonstrate bandwidth and networking links capable of reaching the alien’s home planet. Your signature will be required on our “Liability Waiver Contract” where you will agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Alien Exchange Program should you personally befall any harm from or as a result of actions taken by the alien. Thank you for your interest in the Alien Exchange Program. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Originally published in The New Guard . I love this piece because even though it's been five years since its original publication, it still feels just as relevant, both to the state of our society and to me personally, as it did then. It still feels as though we are searching for a connection that has proven difficult to find in this environment of fear and distrust. I had so much fun diving into this darker theme using the format of an application. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NAOMI ULSTED writes young adult fiction and personal essays. She is the author of The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). naomiulsted.com Next - A Twist of the Vine by Naomi Ulsted Next

The Lure of the Unfinished for Elise Cowen by Amy Gerstler intercepted mid brush stroke those who die young or trun- cated loom still wet with potential those who elude us who fled into death their echoes gnaw at our future and we the abandoned remain unfinished too friends/lovers/ interrupted mid gesture or caress given the slip by loves gone to fossil or scholars' fodder or life-size paper dolls we chase through dreams we cast them in roles they never auditioned for blurred wrecks at rest on the sea floor fish flit through their dissipating hulls sentiment clouds the water their incompleteness = infinite possibility how ravenously I wish her back during nights spent struggling (without success) to decipher her handwriting— Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This is a recent poem, sparked by reading the work of Elise Cowen, a female Beat poet whose small but intriguing body of work was a revelation. She died at 28, so I was left wanting more, troubled by regret about those who die young, wishing it could have been different. My excitement about her work was inextricable from an elegiac feeling. I'm fond of the poem because it's a document in which I try to contemplate and honor the effect her work had on me, and my sadness re: lives cut short. .................................................................................................................................................................................... AMY GERSTLER has published ten books of poetry and received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Los Angeles. poetryfoundation.org/poets/amy-gerstler Next Next - Reading by Natasha Saj é

A Cat Place Bobcats aren’t very big; they just sound that way, filling the night with caterwauling so hideous they are uncommonly assumed to weigh as much as large dogs …There is even a recorded case of an 11-pound bobcat kitten killing a mature doe of about 100 pounds. —Audubon, Nov-Dec 1999 by Star Coulbrooke In Big Hollow they say mountain lions used to bed down on the streamside under cottonwoods, wait for deer to come and drink. One pounce up from watercress and dark grass, the next day nothing, no trace of deer bones or guts, not even blood left there in the soft black soil. At twelve my sister walked the canal every day above the hollows, stopped along the way to look for caterpillars on milkweed, snakes in the shade of chokecherries lining the sunny hillside. One afternoon a shriek tore her from reverie, a screaming and thrashing like ten mountain lions. She focused her eyes across the canal to see in Cedar Hollow a bobcat trapped in steel jaws set by our cousins that morning. You can’t forget that sound, she says. Nothing gets beyond such pain. Years later it returns unbidden, just as everything you read from then on about wild cats will bring back that sound, that scene, that place. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue My younger sister started wandering the hills and canyons of our family farm in Idaho long before she started first grade. Her love for all the wild and tame animals there has inspired lots of poems. The poem has special meaning for me because it blends my sister’s love of nature with my love of reading nature magazines. I like the way the poem contemplates the danger and the science and the girl’s story that affects her (and her sister) decades later. .................................................................................................................................................................................... STAR COULBROOKE was the inaugural poet laureate of Logan City, Utah, and co-founder of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her most recent poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory , Both Sides from the Middle and City of Poetry from Helicon West Press. Next - Walking the Bear by Star Coulbrooke Next

The Gospel of Overconsumption by Scott Abbott Saturday, August 26, 2023 The Salt Lake City Public Library auditorium is packed to overflowing this morning. Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson has invited the public to a conversation about Terry Tempest Williams’ essay, “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” published in The New York Times . We greet the discussants with warm applause as they step onto the stage: Mayor Wilson, Terry Tempest Williams, and my son Ben Abbott. Mayor Wilson describes the Sunday morning she found Terry’s essay in the Times . “My husband and I had a brunch date with friends. It’s going to have to wait, I told him. You can’t imagine what I’m reading.” She turns to Terry. “Would you tell us how your Times piece came about?” "The catalyst," Terry replies, “was the report published on January 4 of this year titled ‘Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse.’ Ben Abbott, BYU professor of ecology, was the lead author, with an impressive list of co-authors. Their scientific analysis was picked up in The Washington Post and other news outlets, including The New York Times. I know Great Salt Lake intimately; still, the report shocked me. I contacted Ben and asked if we could talk. A short visit lengthened to a four-hour conversation. Then a Times editor emailed me: Would I write something about the crisis? I sent her a 2000-word reply, confident she wouldn’t have time to read it. She read it. I began to write.” Terry unfurls the Sunday Review section of the Times , dated March 26, 2023. Accompanied by Fazal Sheikh’s beautiful, ominous photographs of the lake, the piece fills page after page. “Tell us more about the photographer,” Mayor Wilson requests. “Fazal Sheikh is a friend of mine, “Terry says. “We have worked on several environmental projects together, including one related to Bears Ears National Monument. I asked if he would contribute some recent photos of Great Salt Lake. He was hesitant. His work is collected in major museums of art, not really the stuff for newspapers. I reminded him that more people would see his work in this Times piece than would ever see it in person. Plus, I said, you really love Great Salt Lake; together we can do something for her. And so we did.” Terry raises a bundle of ten or twelve drafts of the essay, the work of the ensuing weeks. “The day the piece was to go to print,” Terry continues, “the editor sent me a final copy w ith my work stripped of feminine personal pronouns in reference to Great Salt Lake. They also took exception to my describing her as ‘my Mother Lake.’ This is not what we agreed, I told the editor. My body and the body of Great Salt Lake are one. You have separated us. Our style guide requires this, the editor replied. Then perhaps you should revise your style guide, I said. You understand that we’re going to press in a few hours! Not with my piece in this form. Give me a couple of minutes, the editor said. S he returned: we’ll do it your way.” In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place , Terry’s cancer-assaulted mother and the lake and bird refuge overwhelmed by too much water are melded into a narrative drawing wisdom and solace from two mothers. The Times editor balked at the personification. That much-maligned trope, I think, can be revelatory. A couple of years ago, my friend of three decades, poet Alex Caldiero, visited volcanos in Italy and Sicily, seeking the physical presence of what he considered living beings. “I talked with fishermen at the docks overshadowed by Stromboli,” he told me. “Stromboli is our father, they said, powerful and strict. He tells us when to fish, where to fish, when the season begins and ends. If we follow the rules, everything is fine. When we don’t, there’s hell to pay. In Sicily, however, people describe Aetna as a nurturing mother who provides the best soil and lava rock for building. And when I asked about Vesuvius in Pompeii, people just laughed. He’s a monstrous, trickster uncle who can’t be trusted in any situation.” “Folklore,” Alex concluded, “gets to the souls of things.” Mayor Wilson turns to Ben. "Professor Abbott, tell us how your report came together?” When Ben is introduced as Professor Abbott, my mind spirals back to the moment I too was introduced as Professor Abbott on this very stage. It was October 7, 2005, the evening of Alex’s epic 50th Anniversary performance of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Sponsored by Ken Sanders Rare Books, the event packed the auditorium and filled overflow rooms with another 700 eager participants. The Will Lovell Quintet performed 50s-vintage jazz. Poets Ken Brewer, Andy Hoffmann, Sara Caldiero, Melissa Bond, Jean Howard, Sandy Anderson, and Paul Swenson sat in a semicircle behind the podium, as had poets Philip Lamantia, Mike McClure, Gary Snyder, and Phil Whalen at San Francisco’s 6 Gallery for the October 7, 1955 premiere of “Howl.” Lamantia later likened Ginsberg’s reading to “bringing two ends of an electrical wire together.” “Professor Scott Abbott,” Ken Sanders announced, “will give us a sense for that historical event.” I approached the podium, looked out over the audience, and protested: “Professor, my ass!” When Mayor Wilson refers to Ben as Professor, it makes sense, I tell myself. It’s a marker of Ben’s scientific credentials. But when I protested the moniker “professor” on this stage, the context was different. Ken Sanders’ brilliance doesn’t owe itself to a college degree. In fact, he once told our Utah Valley University students that he was a little nervous because the last time he had been in a classroom was in his junior year in high school when he and the principal agreed it would be in their shared best interests if Ken never returned to school. Alex sat in poet Norman Pritchard’s course at The New School but also cites his informal apprenticeship with sculptor Michael Lekakis as formative. At breakfast the morning after my friend and coauthor Žarko Radaković and I attended the premier of Peter Handke’s play Voyage by Dugout in Vienna’s Burgtheater, Handke asked what we thought of the play. I started to describe how skillfully I thought the play employed an actual experience the three of us had had in Višegrad during the civil wars that disintegrated the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Doktor Scott , Handke broke in, Doktor Scott . . . always on the job! I am indeed a professor. I’m proud of that. But my nonacademic creative work is meaningful to me in its own way. Although she founded the graduate program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, I don’t think of Terry as Professor Williams, but as Terry Tempest Williams, author. And beyond his scientific credentials, I know Ben as an extraordinary back-country skier, as a mountain biker excelling in hundredmile winter races outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as a gifted and soulful singer, as the profoundly generous father of four of my grandchildren, as the inquisitive young man who, carrying his pack into class during his unhoused second year at Utah State University, responded to his professor’s “that looks heavy!” with “not as heavy as what you are carrying.” Professor Doktor Ben Abbott responds to the Mayor’s request: “Our 2021 report on the Utah Lake ecosystem,” he says, “was a scientific critique of the attempt by ‘Lake Restoration Solutions’ to monetize Utah Lake by dredging and filling the lake with islands. In response, the developers filed a three-milliondollar defamation suit against me. Our science eventually won out and resulted in the demise of the real estate scheme.” Ben listed me as a co-author on the Utah Lake report—"Dr. Scott Abbott”—my contribution a thorough editing. "Dr." feels just right in that case. Identity is complicated. When the would-be island builders served Ben with a SLAPP suit, my co-author of Wild Rides and Wildflowers , Sam Rushforth and I congratulated him for the accomplishment. “Our environmental and academic activism has never attracted a SLAPP suit,” we lamented. “You have leapfrogged over us.” In 2016, Terry and Brooke Williams bid on two oil and gas leases offered by the BLM, planning to develop the leases only when “science supports a sustainable use of the oil and gas at an increased value given the costs of climate change to future generations.” The BLM rejected their bid, and the ensuing public response led to Terry leaving the University of Utah to accept a position as writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School where she offers a course on spirituality and Great Salt Lake. “For our next project,” Ben continues, “we decided to study Great Salt Lake, threatened, as it is, by drought and overconsumption of water. Contributors to the work included scientists and advocates from six universities, four nonprofits, and three working ecology professionals. Six BYU students contributed to the report, s did ten BYU faculty and staff members across five colleges. I don’t say that to brag about BYU, but to point out that universities in general are institutions structured to facilitate this kind of interdisciplinary problem solving. We wanted to post the report before the mid-January beginning of the state legislative session, so many of us spent Christmas break developing and refining the work. We concluded that excessive water use is destroying Great Salt Lake, that the lake is on track to disappear in five years, and that the consequences of losing the lake will be drastic. Our report, published on January 4th, called on the Governor and the legislature to take immediate action.” Bn pauses eand Terry breaks in: “Ben, your activism on our behalf is much appreciated, but the stress from your work is immense. You are so skinny! You’ve got to eat more steak.” “Thank you, Professor Abbott,” Mayor Wilson says with a big smile, “and thank you Terry Tempest Williams. We now invite questions from the audience.” Someone notes that alfalfa is the region’s biggest consumer of water. “What can be done to limit alfalfa growth?” “We all have family or friends whose livelihoods depend on growing alfalfa,” Ben says. “Any actions we make must take them into account.” He follows with a detailed description of possible solutions, including federal and state legislation that compensates farmers for losses and protects farmers who temporarily give up water rights. “All solutions to this problem,” he reminds us, “require trust. We must ensure financial, legal, and professional support for farmers during this transition.” Scott Carrier, sitting next to me, a wonderfully skilled narrator himself, whispers that Ben just ended his extended elaboration at exactly the same place he started. “How old is he?” “I’m not sure,” I answer. He looks at me askance. “How has this winter’s heavy snow affected the lake?” “I see the winter storms as acts of divine intervention,” Ben says, “a gift of time to remedy the situation ourselves. The only way to accomplish that will be to convert or shame promoters of the gospel of overconsumption.” "Divine intervention, my ass!" I whisper to Scott Carrier. "It's all good," he responds. I don't know anyone who can speak to scientists, legislators, and Mormons like Ben can. Whatever will spur people to action.” Another member of the audience says he heard Ben say in an interview that if we would only grow food for humans to eat and not food for animals that we then eat, that would solve the water problem. “I had a good response to the question,” Ben says, “but Terry just suggested that I needed to eat more steak. What can I say? My faith tradition,” he continues, “tells us that we should only eat meat when it is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, most of us don’t pay much attention to that.” In her Times piece, Terry also invokes her religious upbringing: Utah is my home. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints raised me to care about community in the fullness of Creation. We were taught through sacred texts, “The Pearl of Great Price,” among them: “For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth.” Great Salt Lake had a spirit before she had a body. Brine shrimp have a spirit. White pelicans and eared grebes have a spirit. They are loved by God as we are loved. Like Terry and Ben, I grew up in and developed an identity shaped by Mormon culture. One day, however, walking across the campus of Princeton University, a thought stopped me short: I don’t believe in God. That is still the case forty-some years later. Heavy snow through divine intervention? A lake with a spirit loved by God? What’s an atheist to do with this sort of thinking? Over the decades, I’ve learned to respect and to respond to Alex’s mysticism as metaphor. I don’t have to believe to find the ideas and images powerful. I’ll wear my atheism lightly in the presence of Ben and Terry, a man and a woman motivated and inspired by their own forms of belief. Spinoza’s Deus sive natura (“God or Nature”) and “Nature’s God” as enshrined in our Enlightenment-inspired Declaration of Independence will be my creeds. Mayor Wilson asks for final thoughts: “What can we do?” Terry and Ben both recommend that we press our federal and state legislators for concerted action. Ben lists specific legislative actions, recommends tiered water pricing, and asks that businesses, churches, and nonprofits work together in the service of Great Salt Lake. Terry ends the discussion by reading a passage from her Times essay: On the surface of the lake, small waves broke toward shore, creating salt lines, but beneath the water’s surface there appeared to be an undertow, an inner tide pulling water back toward the center. If Great Salt Lake is in retreat . . . She stops reading here, looks up, and repeats the word “retreat.” “ As a writer,” she says, “I know my own vocabulary. At this point something entered my mind that was not mine. I believe it was the lake, and what I heard her say was: ‘I am in retreat and it is not what you think.’” Terry returns to her text: If Great Salt Lake is in retreat, perhaps she is holding her breath, as do we who worry about her prognosis. To retreat, to withdraw momentarily to garner strength and perspective, can be a strategy. Retreat can be a conscious action: a period of time called for to pray and study quietly, to think carefully and regain one’s composure . . . to commit to a different way of being, to change one’s beliefs. How, I wonder as I leave the auditorium, does such committment arise? What can induce a change in beliefs? What might replace a gospel of overconsumption? At SITE Santa Fe this summer, art critic and historian Lucy Lippard co-curated a show titled Going with the Flow: Art, Action, and Western Waters. She argues that in times of crisis “artists can expose the social agendas that have formed the land.” Writers and scientists like Terry and Ben lead us toward re-forming our relationship to Great Salt Lake and its watershed. What form that takes will reveal who we are. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “The Gospel of Overconsumption” was commissioned by Torrey House Press for a book on Great Salt Lake meant for Utah legislators who have and will be considering ways to conserve the lake. When someone realized that it might not be just the righthing for that audience, I received a gracious rejection letter. I’m pleased it has found a home in THE NOMAD. .................................................................................................................................................................................... SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor 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 - Tiananmen Mother by Michael Wells Next

The Little Old Lady in the Woodstock T-Shirt by Robert Cooperman I spot her in the Safeway parking lot, at least 80 and hanging onto her shopping cart as if teetering with vertigo at a cliff’s edge, her cane resting on the cart’s handle. On her T-shirt, the Woodstock symbol: birds trilling on a guitar’s frets, Love and Peace in the grass-aromatic air, while her cart totters with the blind staggers to her Bug that she trembles open. “Can I help you, Ma’am?” I ask, as she struggles to lift her shopping bag as if a barbell, and drops the dead weight into the back seat. She stares at me, as if afraid I’ll hit her over the head for her purse she grips like a lifeline, which maybe it is: with all her money, I.D., and credit cards. She looks at me again, notes my beard, what’s left of my hair gathered in a ponytail, sees my Jerry Garcia T-shirt, and demands, Wanna score some righteous shit? If not, get the fuck outta my face. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This might be my favorite published poem, partly because I manage to bring in one of my favorite obsessions, the Grateful Dead, but even more because of her unexpected and totally irreverent and defiant reply, breaking our assumptions about what a frail old lady should be and what she should say. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ROBERT COOPERMAN "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. Next - Frozen January Mornings by Robert Cooperman Next

11/8/16 by Joe Sacksteder God called to our fathers, Take your children, the ones whom you love, and offer them as burnt sacrifices. We walked with our fathers to the mountain, performed the chores they set us —fetched wood, built an altar— though we’d guessed the reason for our fathers’ silence before we caught the glint of silver. God campaigning elsewhere, his messenger called out, Do not reach your hand against your children, for I know now that you fear God. Hearing wrong, fearing wrong —or just angry at the wasted day— our fathers killed us anyway. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Soon after the 2016 election, my PhD exam reading list sent me to the Rare Books Department at the University of Utah's Marriott Library to leaf white-gloved through the Book of Genesis. My mentor Melanie Rae Thon had suggested it, the Robert Alter translation. I'd held the Bible in great esteem as a young person but was feeling at a low point of charity toward a text that so many voting Americans were warping and being warped by. This poem, always a grim favorite of mine, popped into my head fully formed, a kind of revenge. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JOE SACKSTEDER is the author of the short story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books), the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), and an album of audio collages Fugitive Traces (Punctum Books). His experimental horror novel, Hack House, is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. joesacksteder.com Next - Tuesday Night Bieber by Joe Sacksteder Next

You Oughta Know by Brock Dethier Addiction fools the best of us: you smell the bait, acknowledge the hook, sniff it, flick it, tongue the steel point, but can’t guess how sharp the barb, how stealth its set. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue A short poem with a hook. I like to have a single metaphor carry the poem’s meanings, and I like to write poems that might affect readers’ lives. I targeted the arrogance of young people who think they are too smart and aware to get addicted. I’m proud to say that the teenage daughter I wrote the poem for is now almost 30 and almost completely clean and sober... though I’m sure the bad examples around her influenced her more than my poem. Sugar House Review published this poem and reprinted it on a promotional card. .................................................................................................................................................................................... Next - The Black Flies of Home by Brock Dethier Next BROCK DETHIER retired from Utah State University after directing the writing composition program for 11 years. His publications include From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music (Heinemann, 2003), First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers (Utah State University Press, 2005), Twenty-One Genres and How to Write Them (Utah State University Press, 2013), and two books of poetry, Ancestor Worship (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and Reclamation (Popcorn Press, 2015).