Fourth Issue ................................................................................................................................................................... "BREAKTHROUGHS" - 2025/2026 AT THE END OF OCTOBER Dennise Gackstetter Read RECONSIDERING GOD Dennise Gackstetter Read A HIGH SCHOOL MADRIGAL Naomi Ulsted Read GLAMOUR SHOTS Naomi Ulsted Read THE CITY HAS CHANGED Mona Mehas Read THE CURSE OF SEVENTY EIGHT Mona Mehas Read FRANK'S BUICK David G. Pace Read THE LITTLE HOUSE WE DANCE IN David G. Pace Read HAIRBRUSH David Romanda Read AWKWARD David Romanda Read REV. T. SCOTT KINCANNON KEEPS SOME SECRETS FROM HER FLOCK Michael Shay Read GEORGE RUNNING POLES Michael Shay Read THIS HORSE IS THE BOSS OF ME Mike Wilson Read FIRST RESPONDER Mike Wilson Read RIVER DOG AND SHADOW MAN, a story Michael Henson Read DEAD MAN'S MONEY Michael Henson Read STREET IMAGINATION Stephen Ruffus Read ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY Stephen Ruffus Read ISINGLASS Austin Holmes Read WATCHING FOG Austin Holmes Read SUMMONING Shari Zollinger Read FOUND Shari Zollinger Read REACHING Terry Jude Miller Read SPRING CLEANING Terry Jude Miller Read STILL LIFE WITH FLY Shawn Dallas Stradley Read PAINTING THE CAVE Shawn Dallas Stradley Read EXHALING CAREFULLY Christina Robertson Read THE AWFUL THING Christina Robertson Read JUST SO YOU KNOW Carol Coven Grannick Read WHEN HE HAD TO TRAVEL Carol Coven Grannick Read REAL ESTATE Marjorie Maddox Read TIP Marjorie Maddox Read THE DYING ROOM Paula Harrington Read NEVAH BETTAH Paula Harrington Read PURSED LIPS Robert Cooperman Read LETTERS FROM HOME: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Read THE GARDEN YOU MADE Maureen Clark Read LET'S SAY Maureen Clark Read GOING SOUTH George Amabile Read COMING OF AGE ON MY 84th BIRTHDAY George Amabile Read TO MAKE IT NOW David Romtvedt Read NO MORE BLOWS David Romtvedt Read POURQUOI MOI E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel Read RUTHLESS E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel Read FROM COTTON TO WOOL ... and Beyond Alex Barr Read THE OLD MAN AND THE FENCES Alex Barr Read BECAUSE WE CAN Brock Dethier Read TIGHTENING SKATES Brock Dethier Read FIVE DAYS INTO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION Alexandra van de Kamp Read SAFE GRAVY Alexandra van de Kamp Read EXTRAS AT THE GATES OF EDEN Alison Moore Read AT ABU ALI Alison Moore Read CHARYBDIS Mike Alexander Read LAST DRIVE Mike Alexander Read BACK TO TOP

Third Issue ................................................................................................................................................................... "BREAKTHROUGHS" - 2025/2026 POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp Read SIGHT Lauren Camp Read HYMN FOR LORCA klipschutz Read BALLAD OF U AND ME klipschutz Read STONES Mike White Read DOUBLE LIFE Mike White Read BOY Jamison Conforto Read ANTELOPE BOY Jamison Conforto Read CHALK-WHITE, CANYON-DEEP Nano Taggart Read ON SELECTING THE CONTENTS OF CARE PACKAGE NUMBER THREE Nano Taggart Read TRIGGER ALERT Robert Okaji Read RELENTLESS Robert Okaji Read OUR BIG TOES Barbara Huntington Read SHIFT Barbara Huntington Read A WHISPERING BEETLE Nancy Takacs Read SWEET PEAS Nancy Takacs Read AEROBICS BY GOD Star Coulbrooke Read RED CAMARO Star Coulbrooke Read LAST MEAL Stacy Julin Read ALMOST Stacy Julin Read IT'S OKAY Andrea Hollander Read LIVING ROOM Andrea Hollander Read BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson Read YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski Read INCUNABULA, MOTHER TONGUE Max McDonough Read ONE SMALL CHANGE Max McDonough Read HARD TIMES Lev Raphael Read COLD MARBLE, HOT MEMORIES Lev Raphael Read IMAGINED SCENES Mary Behan Read STARGAZING Mary Behan Read I SAW HER STANDING THERE Scott Abbott Read AN AMICABLE CORRESPONDENCE Scott Abbott Read HOW TO TURN A HATE MARCH INTO A JUBILEE PROCESSION Dana Henry Martin Read FIVE COWS, TWO CALVES FOUND SHOT DEAD IN PINE VALLEY Dana Henry Martin Read ANGEL'S DINER Stephen Wunderli Read THE BIRDWATCHER Stephen Wunderli Read FACING IT Shanan Ballam Read THE LONG HAUL Shanan Ballam Read BIRD NEWS Cynthia Hardy Read RUDE WEATHER Cynthia Hardy Read GHAZAL WITH COYOTES, GAZA AND HEALING HERBS Pamela Uschuk Read BLUEBIRD ABECEDARIAN Pamela Uschuk Read Review of EL REY OF GOLD TEETH by Reyes Ramirez Willy Palomo Read MAMA'S HANDS Willy Palomo Read VOCABULARY Robbie Gamble Read GAMBLE PATRILINEAGE Robbie Gamble Read DEAR CARLEY Beth Colburn Orozco Read THE WHIZ KID Beth Colburn Orozco Read HUNTINGTON BEACH, MARCH 2 Shauri Cherie Read WEST ON PICCADILLY Shauri Cherie Read CRASH RUMINATIONS (excerpt) Karin Anderson Read HOW TO MAKE A BASKET Jan Mordenski Read BACK TO TOP

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue GEORGE RUNNING POLES Michael Shay Two teen boys walk along the asphalt bikeway in Riverton, Wyoming. George Jumping Bull pushes a shopping cart he found abandoned in the winter-brown grass. He’s wearing black sweatpants bunched over white running shoes and a red bandanna tied around his close-cropped hair. Jimmy Jones wears his black Oakland Raiders cap sideways, its bill pointing east. He milks a pint bottle of vodka as he walks. George reaches for it. “Not so fast,” Jimmy says. He slurs his words as he swats at George’s hand. “Let me try some, man,” George says. “We’re cousins.” “I’m older so I get more.” A smile creases Jimmy’s round face. A chip is missing from one of his upper front teeth, a souvenir from his father’s fist. “Where’d you get the bottle?” “Papa.” George laughs. “Sure, Uncle Luke just gave it to you.” “I didn’t say he gave it to me. I took it, and then I hitched a ride into town to share it with my favorite cuz.” “You’re in a shitload of trouble.” “No I’m not.” He pulls on the bottle. “Give me a sip.” Jimmy stops. “First you gotta run ten poles.” George looks at the line of weather-beaten wooden power poles that flank the bikeway. Beyond them, open fields merge into the half-finished houses of a new development. “I just ran ten poles.” He points behind him on the path. Jimmy shakes the bottle at his cousin. George is almost a head taller and a lot thinner. “Don’t argue with your coach.” “I already got a coach.” “Yeah, a city boy from back east,” Jimmy says. “Doing his good deed for the Indians.” “Coach Simmons is an O.K. guy. He runs with the team, keeping up most of the time.” “But I’m your cousin.” Jimmy takes another sip. “And I’m your elder, so you gotta listen.” “Ten months older.” “I was premature, born three months too soon. So I’m really more than a year older.” George stops and stares at his cousin. “That doesn’t make sense.” “Sure it does. I was born three months too early. If I was born when I was s’posed to, I’d really be thirteen months older than you.” George knows it’s pointless to argue. “Whatever you say.” They hear voices and turn to look. Two white women in sweat suits head their way. They wear dogged expressions, as if they’re the only two entrants in some fat-woman marathon. The taller of the two casts a wary eye at the boys. Jimmy quickly slips the bottle into his jacket pocket. George moves the cart off the path so the women can pass. He knows it looks odd, he and Jimmy out on the bikeway in the middle of a school day. But he could always say they were on their lunch break. The school allows you to leave for trips to fast-food joints. Most Indian kids stay put to eat the cafeteria’s free lunches. George always did. It gave him enough strength to make it through track practice. And he never knew if he’d get dinner, what with his mom either working nights or out with her new boyfriend. George and Jimmy stand quietly as the women pass by. The one closest to Jimmy cocks her head slightly, probably tempted to see what these Indian boys are up to, suspicious as all-get-out here in broad daylight. But the plump women walk on, picking up the pace. As they pull away, George focuses on their asses. But they wear shapeless, too-big sweat suits and there’s nothing to see. George speaks first. “Those two need to walk a lot of poles if they want to drop some pounds. Hundreds of poles. Thousands, maybe.” “Hop a lot of poles, you mean.” Jimmy guffaws, punches George on the arm. “Get it?” “I got it.” But he doesn’t want to imagine it. Instead, he thinks about the thousands of poles he has passed in his runs all over the county. Miles and miles of power poles. When George was younger, he spent a lot of weekends with Jimmy and his parents out on the Rez. George ran all of the reservation roads. Jimmy’s father tried to warn him away from the practice. “Some drunk’s gonna run you over,” Uncle Luke would say, usually in the evenings after getting toasted in Riverton and driving his sorry self home. Aunt Regina – his mom’s sister – would make a snide comment about Luke being the main drunk to watch out for. The fights would start and George would escape to run. Sometimes he dragged Jimmy along, just to get him out of the house. Jimmy would jog for a half-mile or so, and then slow to a walk. George would run ahead, marking his progress with power poles or cars or some other landmark, and then circle back to report to Jimmy: “five poles” or “twenty cars.” And Jimmy would say, “Do five more, do twenty more,” and George did. Mostly, George ran by himself. In the dark, he ran facing traffic and kept far over on the shoulder, sometimes running through the dry grass. In the summer and fall, when the sun had yet to set, he ran with traffic but still kept his distance from the road. To occupy his mind, George counted the litter in the fields. Soda cans and liquor bottles. Wind litter, too, hung up like ragged flags in the sage: newspapers and plastic trash bags and discarded school assignments from Wyoming Indian High. Jimmy slips the bottle from his pocket, unscrews the top, and drinks. He brings the pint down and hugs it to his chest. “I’m thinkin’ of dropping out, leaving town.” “You only have another year and a half of school.” “But I flunked eighth grade and got kept back. I should be graduating this year. I’m just gonna get a job in the gas fields. Know how much those guys are makin’? Bert Antelope got on before he graduated and he’s making twenty bucks an hour up near Pinedale.” “You’re not eighteen. How you going to get one of those jobs? And you don’t have a car.” “I’m strong,” Jimmy says. He makes a muscle with his bulky right arm. “Not as tall as you but plenty strong.” Jimmy pauses, seems to be contemplating his options. “I hate this place,” he says finally. “Stay in school, graduate, and the Marines will take you.” “Did a lot of good for my father – and yours.” “Join up and maybe they’ll send you to some nice place like Japan, or Italy.” Jimmy laughs. “Indians like me go to Iraq or Afghanistan to kill muj . Papa told me to steer clear of recruiters. Said they will promise you computers and then hand you a rifle. Said that’s what they did to him before they shipped him off to that first Iraq war.” He hesitates, and then says, “I’m not smart like you, cousin.” “I ain’t that smart if I’m skipping school with you and I can’t get anything to drink.” George reaches again for the bottle. Jimmy holds up his hand. “Uh uh,” he says. “First you gotta run those ten poles.” “Ten poles?” “Gotta keep my cousin in shape.” George shrugs. He pushes aside the shopping cart and looks north down the bikeway. The two women are at least three poles down the path. A tall guy on a racing bike is pedaling their way. The cyclist wears an orange helmet. A big gray mustache is pasted on his face. He nods at the boys as he passes. George asks: “Five poles up and five poles back?” “By my calculations, that’s ten poles up and ten poles back.” “That’s twenty poles!” “You can count.” Jimmy bares his chipped-tooth grin. “Screw you.” George takes off on a slow trot, warming up his legs. Ten poles or twenty, it doesn’t matter because I can run any distance any time. As he gains speed, he feels his heart kick into second gear and then third. He can imagine the blood’s path through his body. Like cars on a racetrack, corpuscles jostling to get ahead, to bring George Jumping Bull in ahead of the competition. He passes the third pole and he hasn’t broken a sweat. He detours into the grass to swerve around the walking women, and likes the sound his soles make as they again make contact with the bikeway pavement. The legs of his sweatpants rub together and make a swishing sound. Builds up a rhythm as he runs. Swish-swish, swish-swish, the beat like powwow drums. The sun’s behind him, but he can feel its warmth on his back. He could remove his jacket but then he’d have to carry it. Best just to sweat a little. He can run in shorts and t-shirt almost any day of the year, except those days when bitter Arctic winds howl down from Canada. He can see past the bikeway and the stacked hay bales on distant fields and trailers parked in a row off to his right. He can hear truck traffic over on Highway 26, and the whine of a commuter plane taking off from the town’s small airport. He counts seven poles and then eight. He passes an old woman walking her miniature dog. The dog barks. The woman says, “Hush, Petunia.” Petunia? Pole nine, and when George gets to the tenth pole he just keeps right on running. I’ll show my cousin. Fifteen poles up and fifteen poles back to make it an even thirty. Hell, I could run forty or fifty if I wanted . But he stops at fifteen and turns, again passing the dog lady (yapyapyap) and the walking women and the old guy with the mustache on his return trip. He sees Jimmy in the distance, leaning against the red shopping cart, red so store staff could find them along lonely Rez roads and weedy fields. About this time last year, George received a letter from his father. Letters were rare anyway, but a communication of any kind from his father was the rarest of things. Sidney Jumping Bull, a good grunt in Vietnam – or so they said – but not such a good father. George was only five when he and his mom fled Pine Ridge for Riverton. He had dim memories of his father looking fine as part of the honor guard for powwows and funerals. But after that always came the party, and his father was always in the middle of it, or leading the caravan bound for the liquor stores in Whiteclay (as his mom said, “white people go to hell, Indians go to Whiteclay”). In the letter, his father said he’d stopped drinking after attending a traditional sweat lodge ceremony with some other veterans. He apologized to George, writing that he wanted to make amends for the bad times. His mom – Sidney Jumping Bull’s third (and much younger) wife – received a letter too. She was skeptical, but the two of them planned a July trip to Pine Ridge. Two days before departure, they got a phone call. Sidney Jumping Bull was killed in a car accident on his way to Whiteclay. Sidney had been sober, but the other driver was not. So the trip to Pine Ridge was for a funeral, not reconciliation. When he got home, George donned his sweats and spent the next two weeks running the dirt roads and rugged trails of the Wind Rivers. He ate what he could find, even raided unlocked tourist cars and campground dumpsters. Slept under pine boughs and in caves. One day he ran all the way up Warbonnet Peak. He could see almost all the Rez from up there, and Riverton and the gray Owl Creek Mountains beyond. To the northwest were the pinnacles of the Absarokas. George saw mountains upon mountains marching off into the horizon. Could he run them all? If he did, would he find anything worthwhile on the far side? He watched an airplane, bound for the east, pass high overhead. Other planes, headed west and south, creased the sky. An eagle rode the thermals, turning gracefully in the warm summer air. The eagle screeched, and George heard his own name. He thought he might be in the midst of a vision, the kind the elders talked about. But later, as he looked back, he knew that it was probably more hunger than spirit, his body dropping weight faster than he could feed it. He sat up there for the longest time, until a thunderstorm had forced him off the high ground and he ran back down the mountain, with lightning chasing him the whole way. George pulls up a few feet short of his cousin. Hands on hips, breathing moderately hard, he walks loops around Jimmy. When his breathing returns to normal, he stops in front of Jimmy and says, “Thirty poles.” Jimmy grins. His eyes are unfocused, his face a puffy mask. “From this day forward, George Jumping Bull will be known as George Running Poles.” “Yes, oh wise elder.” Jimmy guffaws and holds up the bottle. Less than an inch of clear liquid sloshes around at the bottom. George grabs the bottle and unscrews the top. As he brings it up to his mouth, the vodka’s odor invades his nose. It burns his throat going down. He pushes the bottle back at his cousin. Jimmy snags the bottle. “What’s with you?” “Sorry,” George says, rubbing his nose. “It burns.” “We’ve been drinking before.” “Beer, though. Not vodka.” Jimmy tips the bottle and drains it. He tosses the empty into the weeds along the bikeway. “Whoa.” He wobbles, leans against the shopping cart to get his balance. “I think I need a ride.” Jimmy throws his right leg over the side of the cart. He grabs the sides and pushes but doesn’t get very far as his left hand slips its grip. “Whoa.” He pushes again, balances briefly with one leg in and one out, and the cart begins to fall. George grabs it and pushes it upright. “Thanks, cousin,” Jimmy says. He swings in the other leg and lurches backwards in the cart. George gets behind the cart. He looks down at Jimmy’s Raiders’ ballcap – its bill turned cockeyed, worn like big-city rappers. His older cousin looks like a little kid crouched in the shopping cart. They roll out of the grass and onto the path. He and Jimmy have nowhere to go for two hours until George’s mom goes to work and they can hang out at his place. “Let’s go get something to eat.” Jimmy waves a beat-up leather wallet. “You have money?” “Papa does – this is his wallet.” Jimmy laughs. “Damn, Jimmy, Uncle Luke will kick your ass.” “No he won’t,” he says. “He won’t do that ever again.” George stops. “What are you saying, Jimmy?” “You know what I’m saying.” Jimmy’s voice is stern, yet distant. “I just couldn’t take another punch. Know what I mean?” “What happened?” George asks. “An accident, right? A fight, right? You punched him and he fell and banged his head? Maybe you just knocked him out.” “Nah,” says Jimmy. “I cut him. He’d dead.” “Maybe he’s… “ “Ain’t no maybe, cousin.” Jimmy keeps his head lowered, talking into his jeans. “He was drunk, I was faster.” Jimmy pauses. “It was once too often, you know?" George knows. Uncle Luke has battered his way through his family, even hit George more than once, back when he was little and couldn’t run away. But now George can fly from danger, run back to the mountains and keep running. Jimmy isn’t equipped with the gift of speed. He can stand and fight – he was tough after all. But what good had it done? He was alive – a good thing – but his daddy wasn’t. “Push us down to the store for some food,” Jimmy says. He waves his father’s wallet again. “Watching you run made me hungry.” George turns the cart and pushes it down the bikeway toward the convenience store. He wants to run, just jump over the cart and head up to the hills. Tension builds in his legs, just as it does before a race. But he can’t run away from his cousin, not now. George pushes Jimmy down the path, taking one pole at a time, counting as he goes. This story was a breakthrough because it caught the attention of writers I admire and forced me to keep at it. I wrote it after getting stuck for two days by winter-closed roads surrounding Riverton, Wyoming. The bike path was cleared but surrounded by snow. I walked the path and came across two young Native American teens. One rested in a grocery store shopping cart. He hugged a liquor bottle. The other pushed him. I asked myself, What are those two guys doing on the bike path on a school day? I wrote the story and submitted it, but no takers. I sent it for critiques at the Jackson Hole Writers’ Conference and got helpful comments from John Byrne Cooke, Tim Sandlin, and Craig Johnson. Cooke liked it because it was about real people doing real things and not more self-absorbed fiction from MFA grads (I’m one). Cooke liked that I challenged myself to write about another culture, to imagine myself in their lives. He edited the story and urged me to submit it to The New Yorker . I did and got a quick rejection. After more rejections and rewrites, I submitted it to an anthology, Blood, Water, Wind and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and it was accepted. Previous MICHAEL SHAY 's shorter works have appeared in New Flash Fiction Review , Silver Birch Press , and In Short: A Norton anthology of Brief Creative Nonfiction . He is the author of a book of short stories, The Weight of a Body (Ghost Road Press, 2006), and a historical novel, Zeppelins over Denver , forthcoming from The Ridgeway Press. Mike is a Colorado native who spent 33 years in Wyoming and now lives in Florida. Next

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

Jan Mordenski < Back to Breakthroughs Issue YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski 00:00 / 01:00 YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski is something feathery but even you knew of its highly seductive danger. Like you, we tend to revel in the cloudless sight of the untarnished dove that lifts our thoughts then sets them down, so tenderly, in fields of whitening flowers. But you also knew that other call, that of the drifting hawk who inscribes the autumn air in mesmerizing circles— the sort we all made on grey hyphenated pages before we actually learned to write— that we need consider his unmatched sight, his claws, his deft ability to snatch up life pick it to the bone before we ever hope to set down our minds on paper. "Yes, Emily, Hope" was written after I toured the Dickinson house at Amherst. Her famous lines about hope had always cheered me, but her life and surroundings offered insight into the more serious aspects of writing poetry. Only after that visit did I begin to realize the great responsibility we writers have to our readers regarding truth and honesty. Previous JAN MORDENSKI was born in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of the chapbooks The Chosen Pattern (Quadra-Project, 1988) and Blue Prairie of Darkness (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2026 ). Her poem "Crochet" was published in Plainsong and in Ted Kooser's series, American Life in Poetry . poetryfoundation.org/poets/jan-mordenski Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue WATCHING FOG Austin Holmes beyond the rain-dampened fence past the highway the mesa invisible in the distance looming in its cloak like a red panther power lines hover like slender black hairs caught in the wind across the gray when we can no longer drink the water drops of rain fall like imitations this cold room is unlit still the morning has amounted to nothing why am I sitting here watching air obliterate air contemplating what I cannot see I can feel the arms that carry us all tremble with our weight their grip loosening a bit more each day "Morning Fog" is from a forthcoming manuscript titled Some Things Weren't Meant to Mend . I wrote this poem on a rainy morning, looking from my office window out to the road and landscape beyond. I found myself thinking about the slowness with which paradigms of life dissipate without us noticing, and how the fragility of all things can drag us into a new sense of ourselves, and where we fit in the world. The poem is about acknowledging that fragility and our powerlessness to change it. It’s about the transformative impact a slow realization like that can have, how it can change us for the worse by taking away our wonder for this world. I want my poems to convey the idea that although we can't alter the fragility of life, we have a responsibility to work in our small ways collectively to make the experience of life as good as we are able to, while we can, for all living things. 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 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