The scene at the sound was of light
hurtling toward the beach, dusk
turning the shore and sea oats granular

and vanishing in the shadows, alive
but crouched in a mode of surveillance,
patient for a glimpse of us, weathering…

We made a raft and life preservers out of fifty raincoats. It was Frank’s idea. We got out of there while our toilet paper and soap crafted heads went on sleeping and the guards felt satisfied. We were tucked in, alright – tucked into icy water in our homemade raft, and by God and all the celestial beings waiting at Angel Island, it held us up and carried us across the deadly current to freedom. But before that, back while we hovered near the prison, pumping air into the raft with the concertina, we were so jumpy our breaths came quick and we thought…

Regarding her work, the artist says:

This painting was inspired by the haunting arias often found in operas. I was listening frequently to opera during this time and found both the vocals and music ethereal and otherworldly. I felt the need to combine this feeling with the beautiful aesthetics of an old, ornate opera house. I believe beauty and darkness coincide and wanted to paint these elements together.

Kate Viola is an award-winning artist, who paints and draws an array of subject matter including, but not limited to, portraits, still lifes, architecture, as well anything fantasy, horror and surreal. She studied painting and drawing during her time at Penn State University where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology with a minor in art history. In 2010, Katharine graduated from New York University with a Master of Arts degree in visual culture. Her work has appeared in such literary publications such as The Rag Lit Magazine and The Horror Zine. Furthermore, she painted and designed the cover art for the novel, Queen of Angels, by David Castro, published by Arch Street Press.

Kate exhibits her work in the Greater Philadelphia region including New Jersey and continuously participates in prestigious group shows in the bucolic, artistic hub of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The look in your eyes of carefree
naiveté, of life lived on the cliff
face of an angel staring through
my plans, speechless to my
ramblings. The prospect of
normalcy, the expected
development of a child,
a father’s hopes cycloned with
one word. But
staring at your newborn
look of innocence
how could I know
I was wrong.

Trenton Mabey is an author, poet, and photographer living in Arizona. His work has been recently published by Mocha Memoir Press, Cw Publishing and in the Star82 Review. His writing is influenced by mythology, Asian philosophy, nature, and a small dose of reality.

We are tempted to make of the man
an angel, the dark one, endlessly falling,
his nimbus of flame like wings,
but this angel is wingless. He flies on pain.
We follow the path of his descent
and his suffering draws from us
an endless feminine response
to the agonies of men. We want…

Regarding her work, the artist says:

Each of my paintings began as a drawing; I make several drawings until I come up with shapes and compositions that I find pleasing. In the case of Dreamscape, many of my influences are evident, the first being music,in this case Nuyorican salsa. The yellow vessel on the lower left has dancing legs, the building and bread (pan) represent Nu Yor, Puerto Rican New York; the table on the lower right is also dancing. Objects emerging from vessels and windows and portholes are also common themes in my artwork, as is the cactus. Visual influences other than the usual slew of artists are George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat comic strips, Max Fleischer, creator of Betty Boop and the 1920s German noir film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Before language gives the brain memory, Licita Fernandez absorbed the stark, arid landscapes of El Paso, Texas, where she was born and resided briefly before she and her family moved to San Diego. In San Diego, where the desert meets the beach, Licita continued her love affair with the desert as can be seen in her earlier art. She moved to the San Francisco East Bay to finish her education at the University of California at Berkeley. Her career as a professional artist began soon after she graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in art. Never remembering a time when she didn’t identify herself as an artist, Licita began her career as a professional artist in 1974.

Drawing her inspiration from botanical subject matter, especially cactus and other succulents, Licita found watercolor to be the medium that best enabled her to express herself. She found in nature harmony, rhythm, beauty and contrasts. She also discovered she could express happiness, joy, panic, fear, power, foreboding—various emotions, moods and states of being through her depiction of her botanical landscapes. During this realistic period, Licita depended on photographs for her subject matter, but she periodically took a vacation from the intense concentration required of realism to paint from her imagination. These paintings are whimsical, humorous, and fanciful. Some are abstract.

During this period, Licita also created Prismacolor pencil drawings, graphite and ink drawings, often using the same imagery but often diverging into other imagery.

After working in watercolor for decades, Licita tried her hand at acrylics. Although having worked on printmaking (monoprints) and in gouache as well as pastels, acrylics became her favorite means of conveying her artistic vision.

From the beginning of her career, her outstanding color sense makes her art compelling and amazing. All her work shows not only her love of colors and how they work together to create visual candy, but also imbues the viewer with a sense of happiness and humor.

Licita has also spent many years teaching art to people of all ages, from preschool children to seniors.

When the man with the gun stopped by for his glass of wine & a hug from La Senora we thought all would be well with our world & for a few days it was. No more mealy-mouthed muggers to worry the neighborhood & no more blood in the culverts. But that all ended just as fast as it had begun. It’s now Thursday & no one is free to reminisce. In fact, no one wants to be around any of us. Oh. There’s the occasional crank call & alerts. But, for the most part, we’ve quartered alone. Samson was the first to crack. Who can say why? He was always the most impetuous. Someone penned a note that made the rounds. There would be a rendezvous at the lake Saturday night. Our options would be revealed. Saturday night rolled around & I heard music in the distance a bit like that cool jazz from the 1950’s. Through the light fog, I could barely make out the silhouette of a sailing ship with the lines of a schooner. It was then he came from the dunes with her on his arm. He smoked a long cheroot & she a meerschaum pipe. As they came closer he gestured for me to follow. At the ship I walked the plank & settled aboard. The dockhands tossed the lines & we were under sail. Two days later we landed on Atoll Hercules where I was to stay until my days were few & my story had become historically irrelevant . . . That’s all I remember of that time & those who were in my company. Once the ship departed there were only the rowers who came in the night & the harness & the incessant chimes.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Roger Aplon was a founder and managing editor of Chicago’s CHOICE Magazine with John Logan & Aaron Siskind. He has had twelve books published: one of prose poems & short fiction: Intimacies & 11 of poetry, most recently Improvisations – Poetic Impression From Contemporary Music: after musical ‘experiments’ by composers such as John Adams, Elliot Carter, Miles Davis & John Zorn to name a few. Given his love of jazz & experimental music, he often reads his work with musicians from the Avant-Garde ensembles Wormhole (In Yokohama & Tokyo Japan) & the Trummerflora Collective (San Diego, CA). In the course of his long career he’s been awarded many prizes and honors including an arts fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. After an eight year writing retreat in Barcelona Spain, he now makes his home in Beacon, New York where he edits & publishes a poetry magazine: Waymark – Voices of the Valley & is at work on a collection of new & selected poems. You can read and hear examples of his work on his web site.

I want to write to you
and implore you to fight
like Dylan Thomas to his father
though I’ve long hated the idea of that poem
and said as much, that I’d never
write such a thing, never burden
someone with the need to stay alive
just to make it easier on the rest of us
who love you with cowardice.

So while I’m aware that you’re waking early,
consulting the mirror and asking big questions
and thinking of how futile it all seems,
know that we’re selfish,

but don’t think we want anything more
than you at the table this year
serving whatever you found in a magazine
that looked appealing on paper
and, in practice, is perhaps imperfect
but will definitely suffice.

Musical composition by Jeff's Solo Band (Facebook)

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems. Visit his web site to read his work or say hi.

Regarding her work, the artist says:

The collage Violeta [from Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval, a Chilean composer, songwriter, folklorist,and visual artist] is part of a series, My Literary Icons, which includes Pablo Neruda, Flora Tristan, and others.

Janet Ruhe-Schoen has been making collages since childhood, as a form of visual poetry. She became a Violeta Parra fan while living in Chile during the 1980s. Violeta is an ever-living presence in Chile. Recording a vocal in a Chilean studio, Ruhe-Schoen noticed colorful, small primitive paintings on the baseboards and learned they were by Violeta, who had occupied the building and hosted peñas (folk cabarets) there, years before. The collage Violeta is part of a series, My Literary Icons, which includes Pablo Neruda, Flora Tristan, and others.

To my father

When it’s not only your memories but yourself you’ve lost, misplaced like a pair of reading glasses, left on the counter of the DMV when you got to the front of the line to find you left your wallet in the dash and had to head back out to the parking lot and turned in a circle, thinking, where did I park? where did I put my keys? Father, somewhere in there behind the blank stare and all the confusion when your eyes find mine, focus and unfocus and swim off, I imagine you in darkness in the tunnels, groping along, with even the damp walls that guided you gone, receding back beyond the reach of fingers. As you stare in disbelief — that you could be this man, this helpless and alone. That there is no shaft of light. No ladder leading up and out and home. No soft hand to grasp or lilting voice to lead you on. Only the echo of your own voice insisting that you can’t have come so far to find these tunnels don’t lead somewhere or at least go on forever everywhere beneath cornfields and strip malls, the slow moving rivers of the Midwest, the hurtling interstates of the north. So far from the distant sounds of the world above, a half-remembered love song you might have heard on the lips of your father in the nursing home as he stared emptily off at a television bolted to a wall. Your lips moving silently just like his as if a song might lead you back or out, your arms outstretched to silences that finally have no turnings but bloom like that clearing in the woods that found you once, a child of seven lost for an hour that may have been a century.

And I half want to let you let you go: anywhere, everywhere, turn left or right or stop, no longer searching for the man you were but drop down deep to feel the ground. And find your hands again impossible and strong and young, pushing the earth across a galaxy of burned out suns like some teenager pushing a car on the downslope of an unlit gravel road. It starts to move a little slow, then speeds up, rolls away, you stumbling after, waving, falling, calling to your date, Now! Now! Pop it! Now and she does — laughing as the engine jolts and purrs and something in you shudders, then opens — like a door.

Joel Peckham’s most recent collections include two poetry manuscripts, God’s Bicycle and Why Not Take All of Me (both from Futurecycle). Chicago Review Press Publishers released his memoir, Resisting Elegy: Essay on Grief and Recovery in 2016. His new collection of essays, Body Memory, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2016. Individual poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including, The Black Warrior Review, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, and The Southern Review. He lives with his wife Rachael and son, Darius, in Huntington WV.

Dear Suki: Rio de Janeiro, April 25th
at the top of the world, the fault down
the valley affords me an early morning
dream. My eyes meet the gorging sun,
fast as though through a musical box
to nettle my heart's roseate blooms. I
scale the concrete steps with you here,
gilt damask charts the seven notes in
my breaths breathed low. A wrenching
anecdote in succession of sounds are
my inverting sky without you. Dearest
Suki: you, who are never still, a restless
skirt tossing my brindled grey, a surface
to my bottom, always letting myself be
teemed with a luster so fine that I weave
stories depending on the slant of your sun.

A Pushcart nominee, Lana Bella is an author of two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), has had poetry and fiction featured with over 300 journals, 2River, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Pedro River Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, The Ilanot Review, The Writing Disorder, Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere, among others. She resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.

Blame the machine
for the fact that white petals on the water’s surface

have closed my mouth to the possibilities
and I refuse to swallow the song

that sticks in my throat
until my husband, lying beside me in bed,

lifts himself on one elbow in the dark.
“Breathe,” he says to move me with the holy spirit,

but this is less about movement
than about a failure of transportation;

about a woman whose jewelry knots in the box
and requires surgery at the business end

of fingernails and straight pins;
about chains that snap and reds that turn blue,

blues that run sluggish and forget to breathe,
giving rise to lightning on the horizon

as dendrite and neuron drown.
From under water, my eyes

see the plum petals,
the white rafts floating on the great sea
where all the rivers empty.

Elaine Mintzer has been published or has work forthcoming in journals and anthologies including The Ishka Bibblel Book of Desire, Lucid Moose Lit’s Like a Girl anthology, The Ekphrastic Review, Cultural Weekly, Rattle, Spillway and The Lindenwood Review. Her work was featured in 13 Los Angeles Poets. Elaine’s first collection, Natural Selections, was published by Bombshelter Press. She writes and teaches writing in Los Angeles.

For H.

Philip Elliott is Irish, 23 years old and Editor-in-Chief of Dublin-based international literary magazine, Into the Void. His fiction and poetry can be found in various magazines scattered across the globe, most recently Yellow Chair Review. He believes there are no such thing as characters, only people. If you ask him what day it is, he almost definitely won't know. Stalk him at philipelliottfiction.com.

When my 25-year-old son died in a snowboarding accident on December 27, 2000, I was writing about raising my two kids, being a poet and teaching, and how each of these three vocations informed the others.

Now my beautiful son, who was to marry his fiancé Kristen in five months, was dead. Hundreds of miles from where it had happened, I obsessed about how there must have been something I could have done to stop this accident. Like so many who have suffered loss, I lived with a barrage of what-if-I-had-only-done-this-or-that’s, no matter whether I could have taken those actions that day or the day before or even years before his accident. Since I had failed as a parent, I didn’t deserve to write. Writing was a discovering, a becoming. I didn’t want to discover or become anything, only to have my son back…