Stacy Julin < Back to Breakthroughs Issue LAST MEAL Stacy Julin 00:00 / 00:32 LAST MEAL Stacy Julin That last meal as a family was difficult. He struggled to swallow the food down between sobs. The kids were quiet. He said it was the best meal he had ever eaten, but it was over for me. Twenty years of sadness and cheating. I admit my heart ached for him, but after he left, nothing would stop me now from locking that door. This poem was written at a very hard time in my life. Now, when I look back on it, I'm really proud of myself. I taught my children something very important. No one deserves to be treated badly, and you are strong enough to leave. Previous STACY JULIN'S work has been published in Oyster River Pages , Pirene’s Fountain , Sweet Tree Review , Southern Quill , and Word Fountain , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Pebble Thrown in Water (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2010), Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Things We Carry (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She lives with her family at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains. facebook.com/Stacydixonsplace/ Next

On the Disembarkation of Sergeant Nathan E. Cook in Auckland, 13 June 1942 by Michael McLane the photo is insufficient— a crudely drawn-map shows only what emerges from the depths what hides within is obscured here there be dragons, no here there be silhouettes and mimics there are only the hulking islands adrift, sloughed from some distant continent of steel full of flightless or unfledged birds we do not see the sky which is the same shade of grey as the hull we do not see the greens of gear the shade of pine the shade of gorse never know of the splinter in your hand from the dock end of the gangway made of local wood and weather-beaten your baggage, the unintended weight is centre-stage a black hole in the image your face half light, half shadow, you on the dark side of the moon Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Dark Mountain . Nathan Cook was the first American soldier to set foot in New Zealand during WWII. nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/first-american-soldier-lands-nz This is the first poem I wrote after my move to NZ in 2019. It engages with the strata of imperialism in NZ as well as the disorientation of someone far from home and perhaps well out of their depth. As my PhD work progressed, I continued to come back to it, taken by both its prescience for what the project would eventually become and its naivete (not unlike Cook’s own upon his arrival) about the history in which the new arrival is about to be immersed. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL MCLANE is the author of the chapbooks Trace Elements and Fume . He is an editor with Dark Mountain and Sugar House Review and was a founding editor of saltfront. He currently lives in Martinborough, Aotearoa/New Zealand and recently completed a PhD at the International Institute for Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.

Candy Chick-Nichols 'Feel Free to Fail' Candy Nichols builds underglazed and fired clay sculptures using slab and coil methods, and a fettling knife to achieve the woven textures. She finds inspiration in African art, particularly the Bolga basket weavers of northern Ghana . The basketweaver Dot-So-La-Lee (Louisa Keyser) also had a profound effect on Candy's aesthetic. Other artistic influences include Constantin Brâncuși , Henry Moore , and the painter J. M.W. Turner . Candy's pottery embodies a personal and feminist aesthetic of the yarn crafters in her family, and her work is a homage to their legacy. www.mudalchemy.com The best advice Candy ever received came from a fortune cookie: Do Not Fear Failure . "Perfectionism" is not a word in her vocabulary. Candy believes the clay should show the mark of hands. Mistakes add to the art if you welcome and play with them, recognizing happy accidents. Always feel free to fail. Many pieces are not fired and return to the bag of raw clay, but many more are finished. Making sculpture is an adventure full of surprises. Candy's husband, David, is a photographer who documents the inspiration behind these sculptures. On road trips together, he is kind enough to do all the driving so that Candy can focus on sketching land formations. The Cliffs Not just appearance of cliffs, it was shadows and light illuminating every crevice, changing each moment, new patterns of contrast forming in the rock and eternal dust.

A Twist of the Vine by Naomi Ulsted We seemed to be stopped in the middle of the road for no reason. I leaned over my baby brother Adrian’s chubby legs to peer out the window while he shoved at me. Outside, just past the dirt road where our wood-paneled station wagon sat motionless, was a wall of forest. The air smelled of recent rain, but late spring sun dried the droplets trying to cling to the dense mass of underbrush leading into the damp darkness of the forest. Well , Mom said, turning around in the front seat to face me. What do you think? Think of what? I asked. Mom’s long brown hair was fixed in my favorite style, with two sections pulled into a gold clip at the back of her head. The remaining strands fell over her shoulders. Adrian, who had been clambering around the back seat during the thirty-minute drive from my grandmother’s house, reached hands smeared with teething biscuit toward her hair. She absentmindedly pushed them away. This! she announced, gesturing her arm out the window toward dense woods. The property for our new home! I thought of my grandmother’s tidy lawn with its perfectly rounded shrubs and straight mowed lines in the grass. I suspected the surprise Mom had been promising me today was not going to be a fun surprise, like a trip to The Farmette for an ice cream cone. This was going to be one of those grown-up surprises that are kind of boring until they are kind of complicated, like when my brother came along or when I got my new dad. Even though I thought Mom and I had been doing just fine on our own. You see? she went on, smiling back at me while Dad leaned over the steering wheel, trying to distance himself from the gooey teething biscuit my brother was waving. I told you we’d get our new place before you started second grade. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be seeing. There were only trees and dusty road, but my mom was happy in a way she usually wasn’t. We had moved from Nebraska a few months after she and my brother came home from the hospital. After barely surviving Adrian’s birth, Mom may have wanted the extra support from her parents, who lived here on Camano Island, in Washington. Camano Island is a large island located in the Puget Sound and, at the time we moved there, was populated primarily by people who wanted to live off the beaten track. People who didn’t want close neighbors, people who lived in log cabins or A-frame houses, surrounded by towering trees and deep moss. Nearly equidistant between Seattle and the Canadian border, both seemed equally foreign to me, as Camano was pretty much our whole world. Although we lived on an island, as I grew older I found I often needed to explain we didn’t get there by ferry or some other kind of boat. Rather, there was one road off the island that crossed a bridge into the town of Stanwood. Even the bridge wasn’t particularly stunning. Although Port Susan was to the south of the bridge and Skagit Bay to the right, the bridge itself basically crossed over a large cow ditch of stagnant water. Although Stanwood was home to a population less than 2000, it was our hub for shopping, school, and supplies. Nonetheless, Camano was a small and as of yet, undiscovered oasis. A short drive from anywhere on the island would take us to the edge of the Sound, where we could play in the placid waves, gather driftwood and look for tiny crabs. Although I’d been born in Seattle and coming back to Washington meant coming home, it didn’t feel like it to me. Mom and I had moved from Washington to Oregon, then to California where I got my new dad, then back to Oregon, and then to Nebraska where my new brother was born. So for us no state felt like home. For me, only Mom and her yellow Volkswagen Beetle felt like home, and the Beetle had been sold to help pay for Mom’s wedding. I tried to muster more enthusiasm than I felt. Great! I offered. I had to pee, and I hoped we could just appreciate the trees through the car windows and go home. Out! Adrian demanded, fiddling with the door handle where he’d been riding on my mother’s lap. Come on, Chuck , Mom said. Let’s explore . I almost asked to stay in the car, but didn’t think that would go over well, so I got out and we all stood at the side of the road, dwarfed by an imposing wall of ferns, pine and fir trees, nettles, wildflowers, and blackberry bushes. Although it was still warm, as days in June were long, the sun dipped low in the sky. Follow me, Dad said. Blackberry bushes rose thick and imperious, although the berries were only hard green nubs. As I stepped onto a trail leading into the woods, a loud buzzing from inside the bushes that towered over all of us, even Dad. Mom picked huckleberries from bushy clusters of tiny leaves as she held Adrian’s hand and he toddled along until he toddled into a stinging nettle and shrieked in pain. She picked him up and continued to chatter about the five acres they’d just purchased. We just have to decide where to build our house , she said. We thought we would build on the south side of the property, but if we built a little farther from the road, we’d get more sun. We’ll need to put in a nice long driveway . Her hair caught in a blackberry bush, and I helped her untangle it as she went on. Besides, a long driveway will keep us away from the noise of the road. It will be nice and quiet. Although the drive from my grandmother’s was only around thirty minutes, for the last fifteen we’d swapped the smooth pavement for a series of dirt roads that became dirtier and bumpier as we went along, passing fewer and fewer cars. As I would find, the school bus wouldn’t even drive all the way back into those woods. Instead, I would walk the two miles to the junction where the dirt roads met the paved roads, my sneakers streaked with dust in the early fall, or mud the rest of the school season. When a truck passed by me, clouds of dirt billowed behind it, swirling like a mini version of the tornadoes we’d seen in Nebraska. I bent down to pick a stem of wild peppermint. I crushed its leaves and breathed it in, then popped it into my mouth. When we lived in Oregon the first time, Mom and I had eaten greens we gathered from wooded areas surrounding whatever apartment we were staying in at the time. Mom hadn’t had any kind of traditional job since I was born. She forced me to attend daycare for three weeks once, so she could go to work as an administrative assistant. However, after paying for rent and day care, where I sobbed at each drop off, there was barely enough left to buy food. So she quit her job and went back to receiving her monthly welfare check, which gave us lots of time together to search for herbs. She made tea from the tiny yellow chamomile buds, which I would drink after stirring in large spoonfuls of honey. I once picked some from my grandmother’s driveway and brought a handful to her to make for tea, but she just asked me why I was dragging weeds into the house. This was all before my mom met my new dad, who married her last year and adopted me. Up until then, it was just us two, gathering herbs in the woods, selling crafts at outdoor markets, moving from one apartment to another. I didn’t think about the empty space where a “dad” was supposed to be. My mother and I had grown from the rich dirt of the forest together, all at once. We were like one organism, flitting from place to place, spinning in our homemade skirts, drinking in the sun and the rain as though that were all we needed. Then Mom told me she was marrying Dad because I needed stability. Because I needed two parents and Mom was not enough for me. I pleaded with her to let us keep just being one thing together, but I knew the real truth. I was not enough for her. Dad stopped abruptly, causing me to nearly run straight into his backside. Here , he said, waving his arm in front of him. Linda , he put his arm around Mom. This is the perfect place for a new house. The tiny trail continued ahead, flanked on both sides with deep woods. There was a scurrying sound in one of the bushes near me. Where? I asked, confused. It will be perfect! Mom said. We just have to clear it. As we stood peering into the bushes at nothing I could recognize as house-worthy, Dad reached around and tugged me close to him, He pressed my face into the scratchy denim of his jacket for a moment, until I pulled away. I reached around Mom’s middle to hold her tightly. My head was now just past her waist. Leaning into her soft side, I breathed in chamomile and sunshine. She shifted Adrian over to her other hip where he kicked me solidly in the head. Let go , she said, barked at me. I’ve told you I can’t have you clinging to me when I’m carrying the baby. Chuck , she said, what do you think about putting in a nice deck? Looking out over the garden? I was ready to go back to my grandma’s house. She was making my favorite tonight - fried chicken. Should we have the garden on the south side? Dad asked. Where should we put the greenhouse? It was also Tuesday night and we always watched “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” on Tuesday nights. Well, don’t forget we need to have a space for cows and sheep, Mom replied. I want them to have lots of space to exercise and be comfortable. As they continued to talk about houses, animals and gardens that didn’t exist, I felt my own needs becoming more pressing. Mom , I said, I have to go to the bathroom. Honey, it’s the woods – go ahead and go. Where? Go behind a tree. If you have to go number two, wipe with a leaf. Although we had spent time gathering plants in the woods, I still wasn’t used to just dropping my pants in the middle of nowhere. In first grade, I’d held my bladder all day once because I couldn’t go to the bathroom if there was a girl in a neighboring stall. I’d just sit there on the toilet, panicking until I gave up, my face reddening as I washed my hands for no reason. I walked a few feet off the trail into the woods. Adrian sat on the trail poking at the ground with a stick. He lifted it toward me, waving. Finding a tree I thought might be large enough to hide behind, I squatted down, feeling exposed, thinking of snakes and centipedes and spiders. I tried to relax. And peed all over my shoe. Shifting my feet, I snagged my sneaker on a vine, lost my balance, and toppled over, landing stomach first on a sharp snag poking up from the ground. The vine that had entangled my foot spread across the forest floor, sending tendrils up and around the tree truck. I lifted my shirt to see a spot of blood right above my belly button. I wailed. Dad appeared, shoving his way through the underbrush. What happened? he demanded, examining the large welt on my skin and the tiny drops of blood. I tried to pull up my underpants, but Dad picked me up and hauled me toward the trail. What’s wrong? Mom said, annoyed. She just took a spill , Dad said before I could respond. You’re fine , she said. Pull up your pants. Dad set me down and I pulled up my pants. I picked a large leaf and wiped at my wet shoe. Can we go home now? I asked. This IS your home , Mom snapped. I meant Grandma’s house , I said, lamely. I really hadn’t meant to say “home.” We had been living with my grandparents for two months we’d been back in Washington. In Nebraska my new dad had been doing public relations for a friend’s non-profit. Although it was better money than working as a stringer with the newspaper in Santa Cruz, California, where he was paid by the line, it wasn’t enough to support a family of four. So when Mom’s parents offered to let us live with them while Dad found a job, we crammed everything we could into our station wagon, gave the puppy I’d only had for a few months to the neighbor, and drove away from the flat yellow of the Midwest to the tangled woods of Washington. Dad had just gotten word he’d be starting his new job as a draftsman. My grandma had nodded approvingly at him and the house seemed a little less crowded after that. Although our noise and dirt and clutter clashed with my grandparent’s perfectly color-coordinated home, I loved being there and wasn’t in a hurry to leave. But now I saw the two lines form between Mom’s eyes that always appeared when she was angry. Grandma’s house is NOT your home. Now, stop whining and act your age. She turned and walked deeper into the wood. I sat down with a plop in the dirt. I’d make her turn around and come get me. But when I peeked up, I saw only their backs, Mom holding Adrian on her hip. They were talking again, already forgetting me. I dug in the dirt with a twig, then touched the swollen welt on my belly gingerly. Finally, I got up and scuffed over to join them. Mom reached out and stroked my hair as we all gazed at our imaginary new home. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This is the first chapter of my memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest (High Frequency Press, forthcoming in 2026). Although part of a larger work, it stands-alone as well. I love this piece because of the child narrator’s voice used. I really enjoyed telling the story of my mother’s attempt to transition from a wandering lifestyle to one that would be more settled and stable, albeit the wild environment she and my stepdad selected doesn't feel either settled or stable. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NAOMI ULSTED writes young adult fiction and personal essays. She is the author of The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). naomiulsted.com Next - Something to Surrender To by Austin Holmes Next