Photos courtesy of the author.
Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada
Ellesmere Elegy
This land dreams up marvels:
a meteorite shower of clumpy
snow streaking under midnight’s sun.
This land embodies ruses:
broad valley floors and nondescript
slopes distorting scale and distance.
By SARAH CARSON
Genessee County, Michigan
On the night hike through what Wikipedia calls the picturesque 383-acres of the For-Mar Nature Preserve and Arboretum, a man in ISO rated cold-weather cargo pants plays barred owl calls from YouTube, then recruits a kid with a headlamp to hold a Bluetooth speaker to a dogwood tree. I imagine the owls shake their heads in their hollow, that somewhere else in the dark of fallen branches, salamanders yawn, a doe wishes her fawn would settle.
By STELLA WONG
Photos courtesy of Gandalf Hernandez.
The magnetic North Pole, Northern Canada
dramatic monologue as Bebe Barron
By JOEANN HART
Photos courtesy of author.
Gloucester, Massachusetts
It was mid-winter, so I timed my afternoon walk to end before the early night. Heading to the beach, I crossed a sea-battered causeway that dropped off to the salty Atlantic on one side, and the fresh water of Niles Pond on the other, ending at Brace Cove. Formed by two boat-breaking arms of intertidal granite, waves were still crashing into the cove from a recent storm. Migratory seabirds struggled to fly in the crosswinds. Added to the elemental roar of water was the steady screech of stones grinding in the surf, too rough a day even for the resident seals. As I stepped down from the causeway and onto the beach, I saw a man with binoculars around his neck. He was talking on the phone and there was a large, motionless shape at his feet.
Photo courtesy of author.
San Francisco, CA
Gold is all you notice at first. A triptych dressed in shiny monochrome. The center of it is just above eyesight, so you’re left looking up at of Keith Haring’s altar, Life of Christ, an imposing piece, big enough to hold most of your gaze and envelop your mind. Haring made the original cast in 1990 and it’s considered his final work. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco acquired this edition in 1995 for its Interfaith AIDS Memorial Chapel.
By LAKE ANGELA
Courtesy of Marilyn Kreger
Diamondville, Pennsylvania
Meryl: In Diamondville II
Quiet Uncle Peck was just five when the older kids
set him on fire. This was one hundred years ago,
and Grandpa told me the story. The closest hospital
to Diamondville sent him home, saying there was
nothing more they could do. Grandmother Verna took care
of him, anointing his wounds with devotion, rotating
his torso and arms, helping him walk again.
By EDWARD LEES
Photos by author.
Lahaina, Maui
When I was young, my parents
took me to Pompeii.
I remember the grouped bodies in the museum
of people who had tried to shelter.
Photo courtesy of author.
Cherokee, NC and Phoenix, AZ
As a child, I watched horror movie after horror movie. An attempt to make myself brave or to make others think I was. And now, I fear I’m manipulative because how much can a person really change. Bones and weight and cartilage can only be altered to certain degrees.
When it comes to film, body horror disturbs me the most. Things that happen to a person’s body without their permission. And sometimes they don’t notice until their bodies are so acted upon that they are grotesque, twisted, so completely othered with pain they are no longer sovereign, but colonized by something outside of themselves.
Catalonia
The sea has moved inland. Below the rectory on the hill, the fields and villages under the fog. In the first blue of the morning. The bell tower of the church in Lladó surfaces through it. It is a few minutes away by car. In Lladó the fog hangs in the streets, close to the ground. Each building in isolation within it. The old church, the locked doors: wood doors open onto metal doors that are molting their skin. The keyhole the size of an eye.
Photo courtesy of author.
Manila, Philippines
In the lanai’s half-light, a softened sun to my left and amber on the keys, I played the piano for my father who did not know the names of notes. I-bitin mo, he said in Tagalog, shrouded in incandescent glow as I shifted from one chord to the next, a nine-year-old on the cusp of competition learning how to cadence. And so, I slowed into suspension, this bitin near the end of the phrase—and all stakes hung in the balance like the last inhale of a life or the final somersault before the thunder of disappointment or applause.
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