by Barbara Ganley

Featured Art: “Holy Holy Holy” by Yan Sun

 

Because it’s Thursday, nearing five o’clock, Lucie is well into a doozie of a headache. Every week at this time little Jenny Baker hands her one as they sit side by side in the dining room and Jenny busily tortures the piano. She’s a narrow slip of a thing with a distracting, gum-baring smile made stranger today by a drift of tiny metallic stars sweeping across her cheeks like cosmic freckles.

Her orange high tops smack the stool’s taloned feet bapbap as she bludgeons the keys in an apparent heavy-metal version of “Long Long Ago.”

The piano, old and patient, takes it. Lucie, who is neither of those things, says, “A bit slower and softer now. See if you can find the melancholy.”

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by Dan Clark

Featured Art: “Basa de Maya” by Madara Mason

 

The priest swings a thurible. Incense,

swirling and nebulous, encircles the cremation urn.

A few feet away, a husband weeps.

 

He’s not thinking how Oregon came to fill the ocean

of itself, how island arcs docked like icebergs

against the Idaho shore, where Mesohippus,

diminutive proto-horse, grazed beneath the juniper.

 

He’s not considering how Oregon drifted through

several versions of itself—savanna, jungle, desert—

then settled for a time as a placid, inland lake.

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by James McKee

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

 

You know how it is: going in to work,

Who looks at anything? You’re late, it’s cold,

hot, raining, no buses again, whatever.

You’re long past fighting this fast-forward blur,

pure A-to-B time, better numbed than bored.

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by Adam Tavel

Featured Art: “Noise in the System” by Madara Mason

 

for my sons

This one has concentric frames
that on close inspection are
pink strips of floss. This one
swims inside itself, three shades
of blue. This one’s stripes
are dead calligraphy: R.I.P. Abuela,
R.I.P. Cousin Juan. This one grows
bored and morphs into a sketch
of a cartoon baseball twirling
its handlebar mustache.
This one begs God Bless. This one
has sticker pistols saying BANG.
This one’s wrists wear broken chains.
This one is lost inside the glitz
of caked-on glitter gold. This one
is impasto red on red that bled
on everything it touched. This one
has forty macaroni stars
and this one has the husk
of a dragonfly where stars
should be, its glue-gobbed wings
unstitching from the corpse.

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by Katie Pyontek

Featured Art by Courtney Bennett

 

Beauty depends on magnitude and order.
Hence a very small life cannot be beautiful,
for the view of it is confused.

 — Aristotle

Not the green bellies of hummingbirds, not

one set of wired bones shown behind glass.

Not the plump folds of tardigrades, not quarks,

not marbles on carpet, not pinhole stars.

Not the improbable orderliness

of ants, not feverfew or curls of hair,

not quick love notes left out on the counter.

Not a dozen kumquats, not an average

of six minutes. Not the intricate coils

of a snail’s shell, inching down the sidewalk.

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