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Letter from the Editor
Janna Marlies Maron
On Twelve Years
Someone recently asked me if, when I started this magazine back in 2011, I ever imagined that I’d still be publishing it now, twelve years later.
“No,” I said.
I have to admit, that is a little strange for me. Usually when I get an idea or start a project, I do have grand visions for it. And by grand I mean really grand, as in it’s going to be so huge that it will be the thing to finally make me famous.
Don’t worry, I’m never disappointed when that doesn’t happen. But in the case of this magazine, it’s probably the first and only time I started something thinking, “Let’s just see how it goes.” And now, here we are, twelve years later, having published more than four hundred writers and artists in nearly fifty issues (this being issue forty-nine).
Add to this that October is also my wedding anniversary, and this year my husband and I celebrate (would you believe) twelve years of marriage. Yes, that’s right, the year I launched this magazine I was also planning my wedding. Thirty-two-year-old me was way more ambitious than forty-four-year-old me, and she also had not yet been diagnosed with MS, nor been so debilitated by the disease that she couldn’t work.
But that version of me and the current version of me still share at least one thing in common: a fierce passion for the power of haring personal stories. And a deep pride in the work of publishing this magazine, no matter how hard it gets.
I’m thankful to have had so much help over the years–volunteers who give their time to this project because they believe in it and want to be a part of it. I’m especially grateful to our art director and designer, Evan White, who has been the one behind the visuals of the magazine for seven years now; to Dorothy Rice, our managing editor, who has kept this ship running going on three years; and to the rest of our volunteer staff of readers, editors, and assistants, without whom we would have nothing to publish.
In this anniversary issue we bring you our usual mix of stunning visual art alongside true personal stories examining relationships and the different roles we play in them, perspectives and how ours can affect those we love as well as how they can change, and connections to grief and creative expression, and how they ultimately shape the connection we have to ourselves.
As I reflect on this year’s anniversary I’m reminded that sharing stories such as these never gets old. And, who knows, maybe in another twelve years we’ll still be here, publishing, and celebrating our twenty-four year anniversary.
Here’s to telling stories without shame,
Janna Marlies Maron
Editor & Publisher
Contributing Authors
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Michele Lovell
Michele Lovell
All the WonderYou told me your mother-in-law kept holy water in a mayonnaise jar on her dresser.
We were sitting on the classroom floor where we met each morning before the kids arrived. It was before seven and the winter sun was still low. You were getting the medications ready for the day.
I watched you pop pills through silver foil packages and place them in white paper cups with each kid’s initials. I remember you said, “Can you believe it?” and how you laughed and shook your head like you did when things were tragically funny. You said you and Mark weren’t going to have kids because there were things in your family you didn’t want to pass on. I can’t remember if I told you, but I felt the same way.
We spent our days with other people’s children. So we sort of felt like we had kids. There were nine boys and one girl in our classroom. I’d finally settled into the job, full time, day shift—not my natural gig— so I could work with you. So we could be that team in that day treatment classroom expected of them. They trusted us. It was working. I probably never told you that you were my mentor. That I learned from you, watched you, imitated you. I think you knew. Everyone knew.
Michele Lovell worked in the mental health field for many years. She has recently completed a book of stories about this time. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Main Street Rag, Hip Mama, Penduline Press, Mountain Bluebird, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She lives in SW Washington where she and her partner run a small senior animal rescue.
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Samina Najmi
Samina Najmi
Sweet-and-Twenty“Are you two homos?” my mother asks her nephew and the light-skinned Parsi boy sitting beside him.
Azfar and Meherwan burst out laughing. It’s 1987; they are seventeen in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan where, by law, they can be lashed and stoned.
We don’t know it yet, but theirs will be the longest-running love of our generation.
Soon they will be in New England, taking the Greyhound bus between Harvard and Brown. Then will come the move to the West Coast for their master’s degrees in electrical engineering at UC Davis, before the two make a home for themselves in San Diego in 1993. We don’t know it yet, but by throwing down roots in San Diego they will become the pioneers around whom many family members will cluster over the course of a generation—to work, raise children, go to college, heal, retire, and for our aging mothers, to make one last migration across the oceans.
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literatures at California State University, Fresno. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in over thirty publications, including World Literature Today. Her essay “Abdul” won Map Literary’s creative nonfiction prize and “Trinita” was nominated for a Pushcart. “Sweet-and-Twenty” was among the fruits of a Hedgebrook residency.
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Melissent Zumwalt
Melissent Zumwalt
Arc and Turning, Breath and BurningSalvation – A Prelude – 2021
My arms stretch wide, in line with my breast bone, then reach back a fraction of an inch farther, popping my chest forward—the two actions happening in near-imperceptible unison.
Then release. Chest pop, and release. In time to pulsing hip-hop music. Synchronized with those around me.
My chest must’ve moved this way—isolating just the box of the thorax—hundreds, no, thousands—of times throughout my life. But today, due to shutdowns caused by the pandemic, my chest has not moved like this in over 442 days. It’s the longest I’ve gone without being in a proper dance studio, moving in close proximity to other people, collections of heat and focused concentration, my body absorbing their vibrations. Speakers radiate bass and mirrors reflect myself back to me, illuminating a truth more real for me than actual flesh and blood. I’ve felt like a ghost, disembodied, without this view through the glass. And I wonder, is this past year what a life without dance—without my constant, ever-evolving companion—would have felt like? This stifling invisibility?
So today, when my chest pops forward, a valve releases. Stagnant emotions caught in my thighs, lungs, abdomen for over 442 days gush to the surface. Undulate down my spine, drip from my arms, blast into the atmosphere. Today, I feel like myself again for the first time in over 442 days.
Today, I am dancing.
Melissent Zumwalt is an emerging writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. She is a 2023 Best of the Net finalist and a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her written work has appeared in Arkana, Full Grown People, Hippocampus, Longridge Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She is an administrator by day and in a previous lifetime she pursued a career as a professional dancer. Read more at: melissentzumwalt.com
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Elizabeth Amon
Elizabeth Amon
This Great AtlanticFrom the cliff’s edge, it’s picture-perfect coastal Maine. The ocean crashes against the rocky coast beneath a bleached sky.
Lobster fishermen’s faded buoys pock the steely ocean surface, marking where traps wait deep below. A foghorn sounds from somewhere out of sight, a reminder of the danger of misty haze that’s never far off.
My father snaps a photo of several swooping blackbirds. They appear identical to me, but he can name them, distinguishing the cormorant from the anhinga by the curve of a neck or the shape of a wing.
It’s been a decade since I vacationed with him in this remote spot, three thousand miles from my home. It’s largely unchanged, yet everything has changed. I haven’t seen my father in two years, since before the pandemic.
At 82, he’s still tall and lean, but now he moves stiffly, even though he hikes these trails daily. We’re at the start of his favorite, one he’s photographed every year for twenty years. Back then, I wasn’t interested, committed as I was to escaping rural pleasures for the city’s thrill and tempo.
Elizabeth Amon is an award-winning writer, journalist, and public health communications professional, based in Seattle. Her reporting has been published in The New York Times and Bloomberg News. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in River Teeth, New Millennium Writing, and The Journal of Compressed Arts. She is currently a fellow in the BookEnds Novel Program.
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Lindsey Deloach Jones
Lindsey Deloach Jones
Most of Marriage is Like ThisA person cannot be blamed, can she, for ending up with all the covers on her side of the bed, the way her unconscious body wraps itself in and around the quilt, gaining one inch at a time? Even if this happens night after night, the blanket always moving laterally in the same direction, toward the bedroom door, until it hangs six or eight inches (maybe more) from the left side of the bed—even then, a person cannot be blamed for what happens while she sleeps.
For reaching, underneath her own slippery, midnight-blue mind, in the direction of a little more comfort.
•••
Most of marriage is like this, it turns out. We are in year eighteen of this one— remarkable, as I am not yet forty. Eighteen years, four children, five houses, two dogs, how many conversations? I want to talk about the problems; he wants to be told he is wonderful just the way he is. I want to dig; he wants to skim. I want growth; he wants pleasure.
“There is a logic to what you are doing,” the therapist tells each of us. “You have a need you are trying to meet.” His office is like all of them—only enough room for a chair and a loveseat, where my husband and I sit week after week, a pillow between us though neither of us resents being there.
Lindsey DeLoach Jones is a writer and editor living in Greenville, South Carolina. Among other places, her essays have been published in Split Lip, Paste, Motherwell, Pigeon Pages, Brevity Blog, Salvation South, and Ruminate. She was recently a finalist for Best of the Web. She writes a Substack called “Between Two Things.”
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Sara Dovre Wudali
Sara Dovre Wudali
Ground EffectA small tag—graffiti—decorates the railing, sixty feet above the Mississippi River.
I place my camera directly on it, as I do every time I cross the Ford Bridge from Minneapolis to Saint Paul. As usual, I can’t decide whether the sky or the water is more important, so I take three pictures. One in which the sky and the water are equal partners in the photo. One in which the sky dominates. One in which the water is
everything.I hedge my bets for future-me who might want to know what view today-me saw on some particular day in July:
July 6: overcast sky, gray, bumpy water.
Sara Dovre Wudali is a writer and editor from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work is forthcoming or has been published in literary journals such as Wild Roof Journal, Blood Tree Literature, and North Dakota Quarterly. She is the editor of the hybrid anthology chapbook, All You Need Is One Avocado.
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Lisa Park
Lisa Park
Jell-OThe best dessert is red Jell-O from a hospital cafeteria, eaten while on-call.
Red Jell-O, set to perfection directly in clear plastic cups, topped with whipped cream squeezed from a can, the snowy tip slightly smushed by the plastic dome cover. I find this upgrade from graham crackers and tins of room-temperature orange juice, stolen from the cabinets on the hospital floor, at dusk in the hospital cafeteria. Instead of the rush of people during the day, stopping quickly in the cafeteria to eat on their way to the next appointment, there is only me, one cashier, and food wrapped tightly in plastic wrap in a refrigerated glass case. I slide open the other side of the glass cabinet to reveal my single dessert option for tonight, setting it on the melamine tray. The Jell-O wobbles but maintains its presentation as I walk to the cashier.
My patients are tucked in, which means I’ve checked on them, talked with families, followed up on aspects of their disease or management, and I need a snack.
Lisa Park is a physician and mother who returned to writing after the pandemic. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Gyroscope Review, The Healing Muse and others. Her nonfiction work is published or forthcoming in Months to Years and Ilanot Review. She can be found on Instagram @Lisalparkwrites.
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Rachel Moritz
Rachel Moritz
Only PhotoOur mother found the photograph last year, during the month she cataloged family archives and sent images daily, blurry scans attached to her emails. in the subject line, she wrote, “only photo of eric and i.”
It was a Tuesday morning. My inbox pinged. I clicked my mouse on the photo to enlarge it.
Dear Brother, I’ve decided to write to you as if you’re alive. Only photo. Only brother. Our mother, photographed by our father. Your terrycloth jumper, the wide brow of your forehead, your eyes downward, lids half-closed. Your name, from the Old Norse, Erikr, made of two elements—the first ei, meaning “ever, always,” the second rikr, for “ruler, and mighty.”
You look peaceful in our mother’s arms. I love how she’s rolled your sleeves back—the jumper is too large. It would have fit better in a few more weeks. I imagine its buttons sliding into the little ivory holes as she dressed you. I imagine, because I’ve adored my own infant, how she kissed your eyelids and the top of your head, how your throat pulsed as you nursed. When I struggled to feed my son in the hospital, a night nurse told me, “Watch his throat to see if the milk is going down,” and I did, touching my baby’s warm skin. A miracle—he was drinking and alive.
Dear Brother, I’m trying to see you with these words. Is this why I’m writing, to imagine you alive?
Rachel Moritz is the author of two poetry books, Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017), and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015). She’s also the co-editor of a collection of personal essays, My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (The Experiment, 2019), which won the Foreword INDIES Award in Silver. Rachel lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son. More at: rachelmoritz.com
Contributing Artists
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In Conjunction, Dafni Planta
Dafni Planta
In ConjunctionDafni Planta is a photographer based in Zürich, Switzerland. For her, photography is about engagement with others, and the creative process is what she lives for. Her photography revolves around matching bodies to their environment or to each other, seeking a place in the world.
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Emanate, Aneka Ingold
Aneka Ingold
EmanateAneka Ingold is an artist whose work combines flat color and pattern with realism. She specializes in mixed media techniques, in which she combines drawing and painting processes. Ingold has received numerous awards and accolades for her work, which has been widely exhibited and has appeared in Poets and Writers, among other print media. She is currently an adjunct professor at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida where she teaches design.